


Winter Games

by KreweOfImp



Series: Let It Snow [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: BAMF Castiel, BDSM, Big Bad Wolf Cas, Cas Likes Games, Dom Castiel, Gags, Gratuitous Authorial Punning, Hairbrush, Light Bondage, Like Really Likes Them, M/M, Not-So-Trivial Pursuit, Shameless Smut, Snowbound timestamp, Spanking, Sub Dean, Team Dean's Red Ass, Tickling, Ticklish Dean, belt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-07
Updated: 2016-12-07
Packaged: 2018-09-07 00:58:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 20,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8776774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KreweOfImp/pseuds/KreweOfImp
Summary: Despite the weight of his hand across his mouth, the sound of Dean’s harsh breathing seems deafeningly loud to himself, shattering the stillness of the storage room.Get it together, he tells himself desperately, or you’re done for.





	1. Guess Who?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BellaRisa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BellaRisa/gifts).



> I strongly suspect that many of my readers are familiar with the lovely [BellaRisa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BellaRisa/). There’s a fair amount of overlap between the sorts of things we write, and if you love my stuff but haven’t checked out the [Bunker Hall series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/342796) yet, you probably should get on that, because it’s delightful.
> 
> Bella had a birthday an embarrassingly long time ago (no, seriously, it was over a month) and I demanded a prompt from her in celebration. She gave me a lovely one, set in the Let It Snow 'verse, which I promptly failed to write. Bella’s been nothing but lovely and patient throughout, and I am so grateful to her for not drop-kicking me for teasing her with The Story That Wasn’t.
> 
> There’s been a lot going on this past month, both in my personal life and in the country (in ways that impact my personal life), and I’ve had a hard time really settling down to write. Thankfully, the dam broke this week, and over the course of about 16,000 words, The Story That Wasn’t became The Story That Is.
> 
> This was intended to be a reasonably short little timestamp, maybe 6000 words. It…got away from me. This will shock precisely nobody who is familiar with this ‘verse, most especially Snowbound. Speaking of which—this fic takes place not quite a year after Snowbound wraps up, sometime in late January of 2017, and yes, for those of you keeping track, this is the very first timestamp that takes place _after_ it. There's one more timestamp half-written that serves to wrap up some of Snowbound's loose ends, and I hope to get that finished at some point...before I die. That's about the best estimate I can currently give. Sorry, gang.
> 
> I hope all of you enjoy, but most of all, Bella, I hope this is everything you hoped for and more. Enjoy the little easter eggs scattered throughout, and feel free to pass them along to our mutual friend for his enjoyment. I love you oodles, big sister I always wanted, and thank you for the gift of the most shining moments I’ve had this past year, with a family I never knew I needed until I could call it mine. You’re the best.

Despite the weight of his hand across his mouth, the sound of Dean’s harsh breathing seems deafeningly loud to himself, shattering the stillness of the storage room.

 _Get it together,_ he tells himself desperately, _or you’re done for._

His wool socks pad silently against the stone floor, boots abandoned what feels like hours ago (but was likely no more than five minutes) in a distant corridor, any protection they might provide sacrificed in favor of the stealth of stocking feet.  Dean is well aware that if he’s caught, his boots will serve as no defense at all.  No, his only hope is to somehow manage to evade the ancient predator who stalks him relentlessly through the halls of the bunker.

It’s been long minutes since Dean has heard or seen any sign of the creature who hunts him, but years of experience as the one doing the hunting tell him this means little.  It would be foolish in the extreme to assume that he’s in the clear.

Honestly, at the deepest level, he knows perfectly well that it’s not a matter of ‘if’ so much as ‘when.’  He doesn’t truly stand any chance of escape.  He could try to get to the garage, try to flee the bunker altogether, but he’d never make it that far, and even if he did, distance is no defense against the immensely powerful beast that has set its sights on Dean.

No, there’s no real hope, no place he can truly hide, no location, however distant, that promises safety.  At most, his desperate flight has bought him a short reprieve, and he’s not foolish enough to think that he won’t pay dearly for the attempts at evasion.  It’s possible that if he were to emerge now, to reveal himself, he could spare himself some measure of suffering.  It’s possible that what’s bound to happen will be quicker and at least marginally less painful if he gives himself up.

Still, the idea of voluntarily surrendering to his fate is unthinkable.  He simply doesn’t have it in him.

An indeterminate sound from the hallway freezes Dean in his tracks, then sends him into rapid-fire motion.  He scurries around a set of metal cabinets, ducks behind a ramshackle bookshelf, and silently breathes out a sigh of relief as his eyes land on the best—nay, the _only—_ potential hiding place the little-used storage room has to offer.  Dropping softly to his knees, Dean crawls into the well beneath the desk, careful not to disturb the thick layer of dust blanketing its surface.  Real escape may be a pipe dream, but he doesn’t need to make it _easier_ to catch him.

The space would be more than roomy enough for a child playing hide and seek, but for a man who boasts a six foot and one inch, reasonably muscular frame, it’s more than a little cramped.  But for that unidentifiable sound (perhaps imagined, but he doesn’t think so) from the hall, Dean would be tempted to abandon this particular room, to hunt for a better, more reliable—and, ideally, spacious—haven, but every instinct he’s got is telling him he’s out of time.

He subsides into stillness.  The seconds tick by, stretching into minutes, and eventually his breathing, so rapid from his desperate flight through the halls, slows enough that Dean feels safe dropping his fingers from his mouth.  He draws in his first unencumbered breath since he slipped into the storeroom, and that is when it happens.

Icy fingers suddenly seize on the back of Dean’s neck, digging in hard enough that he will be surprised if he doesn’t bruise.  He’s unable to bite back the yelp of shock and protest as he is dragged bodily from his erstwhile hiding place, the inhuman strength in the grip more than enough to offset the clammy dampness that might otherwise allow him to slip free.

“How sweet,” the monster rumbles, “that you actually thought you could escape me.  Truly, how charming that you believed, for even a second, that I would not find you and make you pay for your crimes.”  Dean scrabbles, fingers seeking purchase on the edge of the desk, raking furrows in the thick layer of dust as he struggles, but it’s no use.  Within moments, the claw-like hand on his neck is joined by one around his upper arm, and he finds himself face-to-face with the startlingly blue gaze of his captor.

“Hey, Cas,” Dean says, smiling weakly.

The angel’s lips curve upward very, very slowly into a smile that is positively _feral_.  “Hello, Dean.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extra points to anybody who spots the cheesy theme all of the chapter titles adhere to!


	2. Mastermind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean maintains (and will, for years to come) that Cas started it.

Dean maintains (and will, for years to come) that Cas started it.

After all, more than a year ago he was very firmly informed that using angel mojo to win a snowball fight is not kosher.  So yesterday, there could be no doubt that Cas knew perfectly well he was cheating when he kept doing what Sam _still_ insists on calling “disapparating” (because he’s still a fucking nerd) a split second before Dean’s snowballs were about to hit him—and _no,_ that’s not a euphemism, thank you very much, these were actual snowballs.  Seriously, though, Dean lined up at least fifteen perfect shots and all he got for his effort was a madly giggling Cas (and okay, that was actually fairly adorable…the first three times) popping up somewhere brand new to pelt Dean with yet another snowball.

Cheating.  He was just plain cheating.

Eventually, coated in enough snow that he was starting to closely resemble the yeti he frequently accused Sam of being, Dean had to admit defeat—or pretend to, anyway.  By the time he and Cas emerged from the hot shower the angel insisted on ushering him into immediately thereafter, the plan was already taking form in Dean’s mind.

He’d needed to get some help from Sam with engineering the whole thing—the kid had a way better head for math than Dean did—but in the end, they were able to construct something even more amazing than Dean’s original mental blueprints.  As they put the finishing touches on the apparatus, Sam had checked in—for at least the fourth time—that Dean really knew what he was signing on for.

“You know you’re gonna get your ass _handed_ to you, right?”

“Totally worth it.  And even he has to admit he’s got it coming.”

“Since when has a little thing like parity ever stopped him from beating your ass?” Sam inquired, clearly amused.

“…okay, touché,” Dean conceded, “and yeah, I know he’s gonna be on the warpath, but I can run pretty fast.”

“Dude, he can move fast enough to break the sound barrier.  You’re in over your head.”

“Yep,” Dean agreed cheerfully, “and he will be too, once this thing goes off.”

They stepped back six feet or so to survey their work; the apparatus that would dump a solid ten feet of snow directly atop the head of whoever next exited the bunker, once the trap had been engaged (from inside, via a tricky little mechanism of Dean’s own devising).

“I think it’s good to go,” Sam said, nodding in satisfaction.

Dean rubbed his hands together in a moment of mad scientist glee.  “This is going to be so epic.”

“It’s gonna take him about thirty seconds to climb or melt his way free,” Sam pointed out.

Dean shrugged.  “Thirty seconds is a decent head start, and anyway, it’s not about trapping him for any length of time, it’s about decisively winning the who-hit-who-with-more-snow battle.”

“Well, there’s gonna be no doubt of _that,”_ Sam snorted, “but I’m pretty sure the next order of business is going to involve you getting hit with something a lot harder than snow.”

“Like I said, worth it.  But as far as that goes, you’re probably gonna want to—“

“—make myself scarce for the rest of the day.  Trust me, way ahead of you.  I have zero desire to see any of the aftermath,” Sam assured him, shuddering slightly, no doubt remembering any one of a hundred different things he’d stumbled across in the past.

“Music to my ears,” Dean told him reverently, “since we got quite enough of the peanut gallery last winter, thanks.”

“So when you said it would take about a year for me to live it down—“

“I lied.  The answer is never, Sam.  You’re never living it down.”

“Jerk.”

“Bitch.”

~*~

Probably, if Dean had left it at just the coup de grace, he’d be in a hell of a lot less trouble, but the thing about a coup de grace is that a really good one requires some coup de whatever-comes-before-grace first.

Which was why Dean had spent much of the early afternoon sidling up behind Cas and dropping bits of snow (he’d stashed a cupful in the freezer for exactly this purpose) down the back of his shirt.

And pants.

And, one very memorable time, directly into his ear.

It was the ear thing that did it.  After Cas got done squealing and swatting at his ear in a decidedly unmasculine way, he’d upended Dean neatly under one arm, delivered a solid ten or fifteen smacks to the seat of his jeans, and warned him in no uncertain terms that if he subjected Cas unawares to so much as a single additional _flake_ of snow that day, he could expect a hell of a lot worse than that little impromptu spanking.

A tiny, cowardly part of Dean thought for about half a second about calling the whole thing off right there, coming clean about what he and Sam had done and getting Cas’s help dismantling it.  In the end, the miniscule Crowley on one of Dean’s shoulders egging him on won out over the itty-bitty Cas glaring warningly on the other—the British-accented bad influence’s arguments were just more persuasive.  First off, Sam was sure to ask about the success of the prank he’d spent most of the morning helping to set up.  If he found out that Dean had chickened out at the last moment, Dean would never hear the end of it.  But maybe even more importantly, Dean wasn’t foolish enough to think that a full confession, even before the trap was sprung, would save him from suffering some manner of diabolical consequences.  There was no way Cas would let him get away with having set something like that up, and if Dean was going to go down for the crime, he might as well actually get the satisfaction of witnessing the fruits of his labor.

And witness he did.

He figured at first that he was going to have to find some pretext to send Cas outside, but every now and then the universe does you a solid.  Dean honestly didn’t mean anything by it when he asked Cas to remind him to pick up milk the next time they went into town.  He honestly didn’t expect Cas to decide that he should just pop into town immediately to grab some:

“That’s really not—uh, that’s really nice of you,” Dean changed course abruptly, stopping himself just before his instinct to insist that that wasn’t necessary ruined this golden opportunity.

“I did use the last of the milk earlier, so it seems only fair,” Cas admitted, making Dean do a double take.

“Wait, you what?  What the hell use did you have for—oh.  Did Sam finally talk you into trying hot chocolate?”

“Your brother can be quite persuasive when he wants to be.”

“No argument there.  So?”

“Still too molecular to truly enjoy.  But I will acknowledge that there is comfort in the warmth, and I suppose that if one has to taste molecules, there are worse options than chocolate molecules.”

“Does chocolate have its own molecular structure?”

“Well—there is theobromine, which is found in the cacao plant, but also—“

“Got it,” Dean interrupted hastily, not really wanting to get into a detailed run-down of the varying molecules in hot chocolate when he was on the verge of victory, “and someday we should figure out what kind of food is pure enough to not have competing molecules, but now that you’ve mentioned it, some hot chocolate sounds amazing.  And we _are_ out of milk.”

“Very well, I will return shortly,” Cas said, heading for the stairs.  There were times (although none more memorable than last January and February) when the angel warding that prevented Cas from teleporting into or out of the bunker was a pain in the ass.  At that moment, though, Dean had never been more grateful for it.

Cas glanced over his shoulder curiously when Dean followed him up the stairs and to the door, raising one brow in wordless question.  Dean grinned at him easily.  “What, a man can’t kiss his boyfriend goodbye?”

Cas’s face softened as he reached out to snag Dean by one belt loop and tug him into a brief but thorough kiss.  “Mmm, of course he can.  Kisses of any variety are always welcome.”

For half a heartbeat, Dean had actually felt a fleeting hint of guilt at the warmth and affection the thought that Dean simply wanted to kiss him goodbye had brought to life in Cas—but it was gone as fast as it arose, subsumed in anticipation as the angel turned away and opened the door.  “Oh, hey Cas?”  Dean said, unable to stop himself.  Cas turned his head over his shoulder, glancing back at Dean as he stepped through the doorway.  “Checkmate,” Dean said, face cracking into a grin.  He only had a split second to see the confusion that flitted across Cas’s face start to morph into shocked realization before said face, along with the body it was attached to, was suddenly buried beneath a small mountain of snow.

Dean hadn’t waited to see what happened next, figuring that Sam was likely right about the thirty-seconds-at-maximum head-start and knowing better than to waste it.  Pivoting to fly down the stairs, through the library, and out into the halls of the bunker, he headed for the stairs that would take him into the maze of the lower levels. The sound of his own laughter chased him as he fled, prompting him to finally slap a hand over his mouth to silence his own giggles.


	3. Dominant Species

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Castiel: Jewish Grandmother. It's got kind of a ring to it, actually.

He’s not honestly sure how long he managed to evade Cas for, but it was longer than Dean expected.  Now, as he looks into the predatory eyes of the dripping wet, still snow-encrusted angel, Dean wonders briefly whether maybe that was intentional.  It wouldn’t be the first time Cas drew things out a little.  Something about the chase, something about hunting Dean like a predator hunts its desperately fleeing dinner, seems to spark an almost feral quality in him.  And if maybe occasionally Dean has been known to make a break for it just to see that animalistic light spark in Cas’s eyes, who’s to judge him for it?

Speaking of animalistic—there’s really no other way to describe the subterranean growl that rumbles through Castiel’s chest as his eyes rake Dean from tip to toe.  It sends the barest hint of a shudder through Dean, who finds himself twisting his arm, testing the grasp upon it and finding it every bit as unbreakable as he knew it would be.  There’s simply no escaping Cas, but that’s never absolved Dean of the need to try.

“So, uh, good prank, right?”  Dean ventures, lips twitching violently as a melting clump of snow detaches itself from Cas’s hair and skates down the side of the angel’s face.  He’s aiming for that ‘ha ha, now we can all laugh about this’ tone of voice and instead manages to sound more like that kid who knows he’s getting sent to the principal’s office if he doesn’t stop cracking up but still can’t seem to do it.

“Are you cold, Dean?”  Cas asks, tone almost conversational.  Dean blinks a few times.  That is very much not what he was expecting, and while he’s perfectly well aware that Cas is Up To Something, he’s not entirely sure yet what it is.

“I—um, no, I’m good?”

“Mmmm.  I am chilly,” Cas observes.  “Do you recall informing me that I am like a Jewish grandmother, with my precipitous worrying about your well-being?”

“I—er, yes?” Dean says, now completely at a loss.

“I looked it up,” Cas says, tone remarkably conversational for a man who looks as though he is about to eat Dean for lunch, “and as it happens, there are a number of jokes about Jewish mothers and grandmothers, but also several clichés.  ‘I’m cold, put on a sweater,’ was one of them.”

“O…kay?” Dean says slowly, still desperately trying to figure out how the fuck they got from snow mountains to Jewish grandmothers.

“I do not have a sweater to tell you to put on, and my trenchcoat is far too drenched to be of much use,” Cas tells him meditatively, lips still curved upward just slightly in that smile that speaks of nothing so much as danger, “but I rather imagine I can find some way to heat you up a bit.”

…oh.  So _that’s_ what he was getting at.

“That’s, uh, that’s really not necess—” Dean didn’t actually expect to be able to finish that sentence, which is just as well.  With one smooth movement, Cas relinquishes his grasp on Dean’s arm and, keeping him in place with just the bruising fingertips digging into his neck, sweeps his dripping-trenchcoat-clad arm across the surface of the desk, swiping away the thick layer of dust.  Half a second later, Dean grunts as the hand on the back of his neck slams him forward over the desk, just shy of hard enough to knock the wind out of him.

“Jesus, Cas, _easy,”_ he breathes, and a moment later the angel’s entire body blankets his, the freezing water dripping off of him soaking into Dean’s flannel and jeans and making him shudder.  A moment later the shudder intensifies at the hot breath against his ear, murmuring words that Cas knows perfectly well just _do things_ to Dean.

“‘Jesus, Cas, easy’ is not your safeword,” Cas tells him, and Dean groans, boxers tightening slightly as he starts to (okay, fine, _continues_ to) harden, “and it would be in your best interest to show me some respect—”

“—because you dragged me out of hell and you can throw me back in?” Dean interjects, totally unable to restrain himself.  There’s a moment of silence in which he strongly suspects Cas is working hard not to laugh.

“While that is materially true,” Cas acknowledges, “I think we both know that it is unlikely at this point.  I am not, however, above igniting the fires of hell in certain portions of your anatomy.”

Dean huffs out a breath, half laugh and half groan, as the hand that is not keeping him pinned to the desk by the scruff of his neck suddenly worms beneath him, deftly unfastening his jeans before seizing in the back of them and jerking them abruptly to his knees along with his boxers.

“I don’t suppose apologizing would—”

“No,” Cas shuts him down instantly, “and in any event, I would know you didn’t mean it.  You are not remotely sorry.  Quite the contrary, you are still fighting laughter.  Save the apologies until you truly mean them.  And Dean?”

“Yessir?” Dean breathes, despite the fact that he knows perfectly well what’s coming next.

“You _will_ mean them.  Long before I am finished with you.”

Dean will forever insist that the sound these words wring from him is not a whimper.  A man’s gotta have _some_ pride, after all, and Dean is determined to hang onto at least a little bit of his.

That resolution lasts about twelve seconds after he makes it, right up until Cas sweeps the sopping wet, _freezing_ cuff of his trenchcoat over the bare skin of Dean’s ass and thighs, sending frigid water trickling down his ass crack.  There is absolutely no way to argue that the noise he makes is anything but a squeak, and there goes his dignity.  Oh, well.  It was nice while it lasted.

“Jesus _fuck,_ Cas,” he hisses, then gasps as a bare hand descends hard on his right cheek, the sound of the crack ricocheting through the storage room.

“Did you know,” Cas says conversationally, “that from a scientific perspective, because it is not compressible, water can increase the force of a blow as much as two to five times?  I can accomplish the same amount with an economy of effort.  Or simply apply the same effort to greater effect.”

“I—” Whatever Dean was going to say, it’s cut off by the sharp descent of Cas’s hand three more times, alternating cheeks, and yeah, Dean’s pretty goddamn sure the angel is onto something with that whole increasing force thing.

“One might argue,” Cas muses, “that dousing me in frozen water was somewhat ill-considered of you, as it provided me with the ammunition to ensure that your comeuppance is particularly memorable.”

“That’s really not—”

Cas doesn’t wait to hear what Dean’s got to say before setting to work, peppering Dean’s ass and thighs with firm swats.  Just the sound tells him that under ordinary circumstances, this would be nothing to write home about—not love taps, but nothing too awful.  The wetness, however, is doing its job admirably, and by the time Cas rolls around to maybe the twentieth smack, Dean is squirming against the surface of the desk.  Another ten smacks later and Cas earns his first yelp.  The angel hums, pleased, and pauses, sliding the still-sopping cuff of his trenchcoat over the surface of Dean’s ass, earning a sharp inhalation.

The cold water actually feels kind of good this time, cooling down the building heat in the target area, but Dean is under no illusions that it was meant as a kindness.  No, Cas is simply renewing the wetness that has thus far been so effective in ensuring that the lesson sinks in.  And for the record, the lesson is definitely sinking in.

Not enough for Dean to feel remotely sorry, mind (because seriously, there is no overstating how awesome Cas’s facial expression was as he realized just exactly why Dean was declaring checkmate), but sinking in nevertheless.

“I would ask whether there was anything you would like to say to me,” Cas comments, “but I can still virtually _feel_ the self-satisfaction radiating off of you.  Clearly, I still have a great deal of work to do.”

“If the situations were reversed,” Dean complains, now that he’s had a few seconds to catch his breath, “you would totally have done the same thing.  Or maybe not quite as much snow, cause unlike you I can actually be squished, but the double-standards point stands.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny such rumors,” Cas tells him, barely concealing the humor in his voice, “and in any event, at no point were you promised a single set of standards.”

This has been happening more and more often lately.  Dean will point out that something isn’t fair, or that Cas is holding him to a completely separate set of guidelines than he holds himself to and rather than debating with him or insisting that the situation is actually fair, Cas simply agrees with him.  It’s seriously cramping Dean’s style as far as arguing for clemency is concerned, cause what can you really say when the guy tanning your hide admits that he’s not being fair but fails to see said unfairness as any kind of deal-breaker?

Case in point; Dean is left spluttering ineffectually in the moment before Cas’s hand starts to fall once more, painting Dean’s ass and thighs with two solid coats of smacks.  By the time he pauses again to rub, Dean’s well past the point of grunting with every smack and can feel the heat radiating off of his flesh, cold water or no.  He’s started kicking a little, not enough to get him in trouble, but enough that his jeans and boxers have slid down to his ankles.  Cas takes the opportunity to lean down and tug them off altogether, earning a groan of protest from Dean that he answers with the hardest swat yet, right at the crease where ass meets thigh.

If past experience is to be believed, Cas is just getting warmed up, so Dean is a little startled when the hand on the back of his neck suddenly hauls him upright.  He has only enough time to blink once or twice before Cas spins him around and steps forward, crowding Dean backward until the backs of his tender thighs hit the edge of the desk.  Without skipping a beat, Cas reaches down and snags both of Dean’s legs just above the knee, neatly lifting him until he’s seated, bare ass in direct contact with the hard wooden surface he was previously bent over.  He winces, and the very slight smile Cas has worn since he pulled Dean upright widens almost imperceptibly as he edges forward once more, placing himself between Dean’s spread thighs.

There is something about that smile that makes Dean’s lower belly clench up involuntarily in a mingling of apprehension and anticipation, sending a shock of sensation to his groin.  His dick, which wasn’t exactly soft before, twitches a little.

 _Goddammit,_ Dean thinks in its general direction, _have you learned nothing?  Don’t draw attention to yourself._

It’s too late, of course, as Cas’s eyes immediately drop to the offending member, and in a move so fast Dean almost doesn’t see it happen, the angel’s rough fingers and smooth palm are suddenly wrapped around him.  It’s the hand that’s been hard at work turning Dean’s ass a uniform pink, thankfully, which means it’s actually warm, unlike the icy fingers of Cas’s other hand digging into one of Dean’s hips.  Dean groans, arching his hips a little, seeking friction, and earns a firm smack to the side of his thigh in payment. 

“You’ll take what I give you,” Cas rebukes, words that Dean’s just as intimately familiar with as the hand that has just started a very slow stroke of his cock, “won’t you, Dean?”

“Yessir,” Dean breathes, fighting hard not to writhe his hips, both to ease the pressure of his own body weight bearing his tender ass into the desk and to earn himself a little extra friction.

“You know,” Cas says thoughtfully, as his hand speeds up a little, “you have been awfully mischievous today.”  It’s such a gross understatement that Dean boggles at him for a couple seconds, momentarily distracted from the delicious but not-quite-enough pressure on his cock.  “First the snow down my shirt.  And pants.  And _ear,”_ he adds, eyes narrowing a little as his fingers tighten briefly to the point of near-pain, earning a gasp from Dean.

“I—” Dean tries to break in, figuring that maybe if he distracts Cas before the angel gets to the point he’s aiming at (and he’s definitely aiming at something), he might earn a reprieve from whatever diabolical business Cas has settled on.

It doesn’t work, of course.  It never does.

“I’m sorry,” Cas says genially, “did I give you the impression that I was finished speaking?”

The question should be rhetorical, but he waits with an air of polite patience about him that says that he’s absolutely expecting a response from Dean.  All the while, his fingers continue their too-slow sweep.  It’s incredibly distracting, and Dean struggles to focus on providing the expected answer.

“I—uh.  No, Sir,” he grates out, “I’m sorry I—”

“Interrupted,” Cas interrupts, “yet again,” and Dean sure as hell knows better than to point out _that_ double standard in action.

“Yes, Sir,” Dean agrees, hissing out a harsh breath as Cas’s hand speeds just a little.

“Indeed.  As I was saying.  You have been quite playful today.  It strikes me that perhaps you have been bored.  Are you bored, Dean?”

This is one of those times when Cas is absolutely aiming at something very specific, and Dean doesn’t have a goddamned clue what it might be.   It makes it incredibly hard not to walk headfirst into whatever trap the angel is laying for him.

“Um,” Dean starts, then gasps as Cas swipes a thumb over the head of his cock, smearing a drop of precome down his length.  Those deft fingers speed up once more, just a little.  “No, Sir, I’m—I’m good.”

“Mmmm,” Cas hums thoughtfully, “No, I feel confident that, were you indeed appropriately entertained, there would have been none of this mischief today.  It seems to me that perhaps this indicates that you are…” the angel’s lips suddenly curve upward into a sharp grin, fingers tightening ever-so-slightly around Dean, ratcheting the pressure from not-quite directly into just-right, “…understimulated.”

“Cas, no, I—”

“Hush,” Cas rebukes heatlessly, and Dean bites back whatever he was about to say, but can’t suppress his harsh gasps as his pleasure spirals higher, approaching the point of no return, “I must endeavor to make up for my neglect.”  His hand twists _just so,_ and in the instant Dean’s sure that Cas is going to actually going to let him come, that it’s too late to avert the orgasm, the rough fingers are suddenly gone.  Dean’s groan echoes through the room.  His hands jerk convulsively, desperate to fly to his groin and finish himself, but a single quirk of Cas’s brow is enough to still them.  Dean wraps his fingers around the edge of the desk and squeezes hard, trying to catch his breath, trying to reclaim anything resembling composure.  “I think,” Cas says, “we ought to play a game.”

Oh, _shit._


	4. Wits and Wagers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Let's play a game.

Cas really loves games.  All kinds of games.  Board games, card games, computer games, memory games, puzzle games, gameshows on television—you name it, he loves it. It’s actually kind of adorable, one of his more endearing quirks, despite that whole thing where his board game obsession nearly got all three of them killed last winter.

Dean’s got no objection to this particular pastime of Cas’s, particularly since he’s now got his own laptop and doesn’t have to swipe Dean’s to play solitaire and cookie clicker (he’s gotta be the only living creature on the planet that still plays that thing).  No, the board games are fine.  The card games are fine.  The computer games, the memory games, the puzzle games, the gameshows—they’re all just fine.

It’s the _other_ games that are...problematic.

His very own concoctions, neatly crafted to ensure that no matter what the rules are, no matter what the stakes are, Dean _always_ loses.

It seems unlikely that this time will be much different.  Still, Dean has to try.

“Checkers?” He suggests, trying to ignore the drop of precome glistening at the end of his hard-enough-to-cut-glass, aching cock.

“Oh, no,” Cas rumbles, smile widening just a hair, “you’ve given me a far better idea.  You see, Dean,” he says in that conversational tone that always bodes ill, “you ran.”

And just like that, Dean knows—not the details, of course, but the general shape of where Cas is going with this—and the knowledge sends his heartrate ratcheting skyward, the jolt of adrenaline quickening the breath that had just really started to slow.

“You ran, Dean,” Cas continues, and Dean jerks suddenly as the angel’s fingertips skate over the head of his cock, spreading that drop of precome down his length before that goddamned hand again wraps around him and starts to move.  He skips the preliminaries this time, setting a pace and gripping firmly enough that anyone would assume he was actually aiming to get Dean off.

Dean knows better.

He can’t quite stop the whine that escapes his lips, a wordless protest that provokes no mercy in Cas.  “And you hid,” Cas goes on, hand speeding up a little as Dean hurtles toward the edge, “so I can only assume that you are in the mood for a game of hide and seek.”

Dean whimpers, hips involuntarily arching toward Cas, and just as he’s about to go off like a goddamn rocket, the hand is gone once again, leaving him aching and unfulfilled.  _“Cas,”_ he whines, and the angel neatly presses the hand that was just around his cock over his mouth, silencing him and smearing a streak of Dean’s own precome over his lips.

“Far be it from me to deny you such a request,” Cas continues his fucking monologue, because of course he does, “and I thought perhaps I might give you an opportunity for…mercy.”

That’s not a word Cas uses often, and Dean knows better than to trust it.

“Ten feet of snow,” the angel observes.  “You dropped ten feet of snow on my head.”  There’s a moment in which the only sound is Dean’s harsh breathing against Cas’s silencing hand.  “What is my favorite number, Dean?” He snaps suddenly, releasing Dean’s mouth.

“Three, Sir,” Dean says instantly.  There are actually two right answers to this question, but he’s pretty sure he sees where Cas is going with this, and he’s hoping maybe he can—nope.

“My _other_ favorite number,” Cas purrs, the corner of his lips pulling upward a little.  Dean sighs.

“Ten, Sir,” he says, unable to keep the long-suffering note from his voice.

“Good boy,” Cas praises, “and what’s ten multiplied by ten?”

“One hundred, Sir,” Dean says, cringing already.

“So it is.  It seems to me that one hundred smacks is an eminently fair—indeed, _merciful,”_ there’s that goddamn word again, no matter how out of place, “sentence, considering the crime.  So, you have one hundred smacks coming.  The hairbrush, I think,” Cas says, somehow producing the heavy wooden hairbrush in question from out of thin air, and frankly, Dean doesn’t think that’s a fair use of angel mojo either.

“But you already—” Dean starts to protest, to point out that Cas has already delivered at least a solid fifty bare-handed swats, and on a wet ass no less.

Honestly, he should know better.

“One hundred and ten, then,” Cas says genially, “although I am happy to revise that number again if you have any other objections to register?”

Dean snaps his mouth shut and shakes his head vigorously.

“So,” Cas says, “about that game.  You were so eager to run and hide from me, it seems only right to provide you with the opportunity to do just that.”

Oh, this is…this is not good (and also _awesome,_ but in that slightly sick stomach, terrified anticipation kind of way).

“What was that first favorite number again?” Cas inquires, and sure enough, his hand drops back to Dean’s cock, sliding his fingertips lightly over the shaft, up and down, up and down.

“Th—three, Sir,” Dean chokes out, feeling that goddamn orgasm—the one he’s got no fucking chance of actually seeing anytime soon—start to build already

“Indeed.  So.  You have one hundred and ten smacks with the hairbrush coming to you.  In a moment, I will send you off with a head start.  Shortly thereafter, I will come looking for you,” Cas tells him, and if Dean’s bare ass wasn’t stinging and tingling against the wooden surface of a desk while Cas skates him along the edge of his third near-orgasm in as many minutes, he might point out to Cas that he knows the fucking rules of hide and seek, thank you very much.  As it is, he keeps his mouth shut, his teeth digging hard into his own bottom lip.  “For every minute you evade me,” Cas says, “I will remove three smacks from your total count.  If you can elude me for thirty-seven minutes, we will call it even and you can avoid the hairbrush altogether—for today, at any rate.  But the moment you fail, the moment I find you?”  Those blue eyes flash, and Cas leans forward until he and Dean are damn near nose-to-nose, “you are _mine,_ little boy, to do with as I please.  And the hairbrush is only the beginning.”

Dean moans, throwing his head back as the combination of those words and the fingertips on his cock drag him right up to the brink of orgasm.  That, of course, is when the fingertips fall away and Cas steps back.

“By all rights,” the angel observes, “I really ought to give you no more than thirty seconds, but I’m feeling extra generous, so let us call it…three minutes.  From the moment you leave this room, you have three free minutes.  What do you say?”

Dean gawks at him for a moment, panting hard, desperately trying to collect himself enough to string words together in some semblance of sense.  Luckily, Cas is looking for something very specific here, and the threatening glimmer in the angel’s eyes leaves Dean about as disinclined to brat off as he’s ever been—and anyway, he’s probably met his personal bratting quotient for the remainder of the month with the whole snow mountain stunt.

“Th—thank you, Sir,” Dean grates out, considering the whole speaking endeavor a success when he only stumbles over his own tongue once.

“Good boy,” Cas praises, then jerks his head, motioning Dean to climb down off the desk.  Dean hops to it, lest Cas decide he’s cutting into his own head start, but when he reaches for his pants, Cas’s smile widens into something that reminds Dean powerfully of that shark from Finding Nemo.  “Oh no,” Cas murmurs, shaking his head.  “You won’t be needing those.”

“But Sam—”

“—is not here, and as it is clear that there’s no way you could have rigged that apparatus alone, I feel quite confident that he had advance warning of how the remainder of today might play out.  The odds of him returning before I am finished with you are negligible.  If you wish to continue debating, though, I am more than happy to deduct time from your head start in order to discuss this further.”

Surprise, surprise.  For all that he still manages to spice things up impressively, long experience has taught Dean more than a few things about how Cas operates.

“Nosir,” Dean hastens, although he’s still grimacing at the idea of fleeing through the bunker with his cock happily waving in the wind.  Seriously?  At least he still has his—

“Shirts off, too, I think,” Cas instructs, and Dean sighs deeply as he shrugs out of his flannel and reaches for the hem of his henley.  Much though he may object to this particular piece of Cas’s agenda, he wants that goddamn head start.  Figuring he’ll earn himself some points, he reaches down for his own socks next without being instructed, but Cas gives a swift shake of his head.  There’s just the slightest glint of mischief in the angel’s eyes as he intones, “oh no, keep those on.  We cannot have your feet getting cold, now, can we?”

If there were a camera around, this is where Dean would be staring into it like Jim from The Office.  As it stands, he has to settle for directing his best unamused face at Cas, and is totally unsurprised to see it rolls off Cas’s back like water off a duck.  The angel merely quirks a brow at him in that very specific way that turns Dean’s knees to water, then nods once, sharply at the door.  “Three minutes, Dean, and then?  Then, I am coming for you.”

It takes half a second for Dean to register that Cas means starting _now,_ and for fuck’s sake, with this kind of slow-witted response time, it’s a goddamn miracle some enterprising ghost didn’t get the jump on him years ago.

Cas shifts to lean back against the desk Dean was lately bent over, tapping the hairbrush lightly against his own thigh, and _that_ is more than enough to knock Dean out of his stupor.  Without another word, Dean is off, out the door and down the hallway at a run.

Three minutes, and he has no intention of wasting another second.


	5. About Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The house always wins.

Dean makes it three hallways away from the storage room in question before it occurs to him that a strategy might be a good idea.  Sure, he could just run for it, get as far away as possible from Cas in the time he has available to him, but if you’re not paying close attention it’s pretty easy to get turned around in the maze of the bunker’s lower levels, and the last thing he needs is to somehow end up running headlong into the room he just left with only a few seconds to go on his head start.

So, strategy it is.

He doesn’t stop moving, but he does slow down, striding quickly down another couple hallways, making sure to keep an eye out for familiar landmarks as he goes.  He’s guessing he’s got another two and a half minutes or thereabouts, and—

_“Thirty seconds gone,”_ Cas’s voice intones, and in the second before Dean whips around, he’s briefly _furious,_ because come the fuck on, following him through the bunker to count down at him kind of defeats the purpose of a head start.

He pivots, eyes flashing and mouth open to unleash a bitter diatribe on how head starts work, but the words die on his tongue as he’s faced with an empty hallway.

Cas isn’t there.

_“Make that 35 seconds gone,”_ Cas’s amused voice comes, _“while you presumably glared at empty space.  As it turns out, angelic vocal resonance works even better than a speaker system.”_

Okay, seriously?  It may not be quite as blatant cheating as actually following Dean around, but this whole surround sound shit is clearly meant to unnerve him further, to make him feel all the more vulnerable.

And it’s working.

Bad enough to be nearly naked, painfully aroused, with a (fairly mildly, but still) stinging ass, knowing something infinitely more powerful—not to mention _clothed—_ than you is hunting you, but to have to hear that coolly amused voice counting down to zero hour?  Yeah, Dean thinks he might have a sense of how the fox in a foxhunt feels when it hears the goddamn horn.

“Fucking cheating,” Dean mutters mutinously to himself, because while he can hear Cas, he’s assuming that part of the head start is that Cas isn’t actively listening to him, and he’s very much in need of a little mutiny.

He gets moving again, but not before the voice that somehow resonates all around him declares that he’s now 45 seconds down.  Shit, he has to focus.  He’s losing way too much time that was meant to be spent strategizing.

The first decision he needs to make is his overall approach.  He can just run—make it as far as possible, ideally in a direction that Cas is unlikely to suspect—or he can hide.  He can find an out-of-the-way place to conceal himself (hopefully one that’s a little less cramped than the damn well of the desk) and cross his fingers that Cas doesn’t manage to sniff him out for at least a half hour.

There are benefits to either strategy, and—

_“I rather imagine,”_ the disembodied voice shatters the silence once more, _“that you’re struggling to decide on a plan of attack now.  Do you cover as much distance as you can manage and hope that saves you, or do you hunker down in some obscure corner and hope that I pass you right by on my hunt?  Decisions, decisions.”_

Goddammit.  Dean knows Cas isn’t actually reading his mind—this has been a discussion in the relationship more than once, and it’s not something Cas ever does intentionally without Dean’s express permission, although he’s capable of it.  This is just that really fucking annoying ability he has to mindread without actually mindreading.

Dean hurries down still another hallway, still undecided on his ultimate strategy.  He needs to decide, and he needs to do it now, but how can he—oh.  Without planning it, he finds himself in a familiar place, a hallway that he vividly remembers from another time he fled from Cas and the punishment he knew he had coming, just about one year ago.  Despite Dean sprinting as fast as he was capable, despite Cas being behind him when he started, the angel had somehow appeared directly in Dean’s path, totally unwinded, right in this very hallway.  The bunker had the same warding on it then limiting angel teleportation (not hard to remember that, given the month spent trapped by eight feet of snow and Team Free Will’s uncanny ability to outsmart themselves), so Cas must have simply used his own natural speed—and that is considerable.

He’s been known to traverse bunker hallways at over 35mph when sufficiently motivated, and Dean’s fast but he sure as hell ain’t that fast.

So.  Hiding it is.

_“Two minutes, little boy,”_ Cas says, voice a lower and more intimate murmur that feels as if it’s spoken directly in Dean’s ear.  He shudders, that voice succeeding where the cool air of the bunker has thus far failed, raising gooseflesh on every inch of his exposed skin.

A hiding place.  Somewhere Cas won’t think to look.

Okay.  Okay.  He can do this.  He just has to _think._

Sliding to a halt, he makes the decision to waste ten precious seconds, to close his eyes and _focus_ on what he needs and how close he can get to it, given what he has available.  He needs a place that’s out of the way, that’s a nontraditional hiding spot, and ideally one that’s possible for him to escape from if he has reason to think he’s about to get found out.  In a perfect world, it’d be someplace that he’s likely to get some advance warning if Cas is approaching.

It comes to him in a heartbeat, and he says a silent vow to thank Sam if by some goddamn miracle this works.

Last winter, Sam became the world champion of hide and seek, whether or not that’s what he was aiming at.  He came up with a veritable cornucopia of obscure places to tuck himself to sublimate his weird voyeur-therapist phase, and it took Dean and Cas weeks of struggling to figure out how he was doing it before Sam finally revealed that he’d been using the goddamned ventilation system to get around.

Long after the fact, Dean made Sam give him a tour of the network of tunnels and crawlspaces he’d been using to sneak up on them, so he knows his way around them a bit, albeit not as well as Sam does.  The best part, though?  Cas didn’t come on that little expedition, which means he lacks even the knowledge Dean has.

Maybe it’s the first thing Cas will think of, and thirty seconds after Dean’s head start runs out, he’ll crawl around a corner and be nose-to-nose with Cas, but on short notice, it’s the best thing Dean can come up with.  Anyway, it’s not like he has time to second guess himself, as the unnaturally resonating gravelly voice confirms when it informs him, _“one minute and 45 seconds, Dean.”_

Just like that, Dean’s back to a sprint, aiming for the stairs that’ll take him one floor up, to the laundry room that boasts one of the more easily accessible ducts into the ventilation system, an entrance Sam informed Dean that he made extensive use of when he needed to get to either the boiler room or the garage.

Dean figures he’ll aim to hover in the ventilation system somewhere near the boiler room.  Given that the room has sort of special significance to them, he assumes Cas will expect him to avoid the hell out of it, and if you add on the fact that Dean won’t actually be in the room itself, he’ll be in the walls _near_ the room, it’s not terrible as strategies go.

He makes it upstairs, Cas’s voice chasing him down a hallway.  _“One minute and thirty seconds Dean.  Ninety seconds until your time runs out.  Ninety seconds until your ass is_ mine _.”_  

Were Dean able to pull the same vocal resonance trick, this might be where he made a snarky comment about being surprised to hear that Cas didn’t already consider Dean’s ass his, head start or no.  As things stand, he simply pushes himself to greater speed, grimacing a little as he reaches down to grab his cock.  He’s not aiming to jack off or anything, but the whole dashing through the bunker situation is complicated by the fact that an erection is really not meant to bobble around in the breeze like a sailboat on choppy seas, and in the absence of the clothing that would usually stabilize him, a man’s gotta do what he can.

If it was hard to take himself seriously while wearing only socks and a light pink tinge on his ass, fleeing his angelic boyfriend through the oldest and most complete repository of supernatural artifacts and knowledge the world boasts (and it was), it’s completely impossible to take himself seriously while doing all of the above _and_ acting as his own jockstrap.  Probably the only way he could feel more ridiculous is if he came around a corner and ran headlong into Sam, and thankfully that seems unlikely, for all the reasons Cas laid out when he was refusing to let Dean put some goddamn pants on.

Ridiculous or no, Dean doesn’t slow his stride until he reaches the laundry room, and then he only narrowly manages to skid to a halt (fucking socks on smooth concrete floors) before the wall would’ve more abruptly arrested his momentum.  He’s breathing hard, and is somewhat less than surprised when that unnaturally echoing voice pipes up after what felt like a long break.  _“One minute, Dean.  Sixty seconds.  Shall I count them out for you?  I’d hate for you to lose track of your remaining time.”_

“Schmuck,” Dean mutters, rolling his eyes skyward, but he doesn’t let his annoyance slow him down any as Cas begins his promised countdown.  Another reason he picked this room to enter the system is that it’s one of a few whose ventilation duct covers aren’t secured in place by screws.  It’s fixed on a simple hinge that allows it to swing upward and out.  The one in the boiler room uses the same mechanism, which means if somehow Cas gets into the ventilation system and Dean needs a quick exit back into the bunker proper, he won’t end up cornered with no way out behind a duct cover that can only be unscrewed from the outside.  The duct is high up on the wall behind the row of ancient (but still impressively functional) dryers, and he easily hops up atop the nearest one _(“Fifty-four, fifty-three…”),_ careful to keep quiet just in case Cas _is_ listening, then wrestles the duct cover up and pulls himself up and into it.  The strength in his arms is more than sufficient to get him there, and he wriggles his way in until the cover swings back shut in the wake of his socked feet.  Grimacing a little as his cock brushes against the—thankfully warm—metal, Dean pauses for a second to orient himself.

But only a second, because that goddamned voice is still at it.  _“Forty-six, forty-five…”_

“Seriously, I love you, but you’re a schmuck,” Dean mutters again, despite his reasonable confidence that Cas isn’t currently listening.  It’s at least slightly cathartic, and having had his say, however unheard, Dean sets off.  This particular passageway is narrow enough that he has to do a weird sort of army-crawl, which wouldn’t be a big deal if he wasn’t _fucking naked._ As it is, the unsettling feeling of the central-heat-warmed metal brushing against his cock still doesn’t manage to dim his arousal, although it’s nowhere near as effective as Cas’s obnoxiously skilled hands at dragging Dean back toward orgasm.  He’s still hard, yeah, but there’s no real risk that the ventilation shaft is going to get him off—which is just as well, since Cas would know Dean had come the second he got anywhere near him, and Dean’s pretty sure the hairbrush would end up replaced with something a lot less fun. 

The further he gets into the passage the darker it gets.  There are very dim emergency lights spaced periodically throughout the ventilation system—Dean assumed at first they were just meant for maintenance workers, but Sam showed him the blueprints indicating that the ventilation system had a secondary use as a last resort of escape tunnels for the Men of Letters, in the event of a coordinated attack on the bunker.  Despite the lights, though, the tunnels are extremely dim, and some of the side passages are entirely unlit.  It’s a little creepy at best and completely unnerving at worst, but it’s Dean’s best chance at the moment, so he goes with it.

Despite the limits his current state of dishabille, the dim lighting, and the cramped passage place on his speed, Dean makes it to the point at which that ventilation shaft branches out into three others in fairly short order ( _“Thirty-two, thirty-one…”)_ and unerringly turns right into a better-lit passageway wide enough for him to properly crawl.  It’s still not the most comfortable on bare knees, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the previous state of affairs and allows him to move a good deal faster.  He bears left at the next fork (four options instead of three this time) and immediately rises to a crouch.  For the first time he’s actually grateful to Cas for making him leave his socks on, because they remove enough friction to allow him to move quickly while sort of shuffling along without lifting his feet, rather than actually running, which would probably echo thunderously through the walls.  Or floors.  Or ceiling.  Whatever he’s closest to now.

He has to pause for a second at the next fork, briefly uncertain of whether he should be bearing soft left or taking the hard left, and the goddamned voice in his ear ( _“Nineteen, eighteen…”)_ isn’t exactly helping his focus.  He closes his eyes and makes himself travel back in time to when Sam walked him through the same tunnels, explaining how he made it to the boiler room despite the locked door on one of the first and most unnerving times he deliberately observed them going at it.

It takes Dean a moment _(“Thirteen, twelve…”)_ but it comes to him in a flash and he takes a hard left, dropping again to a crawl.  The next fork has only two options—straight ahead or hard right—and Dean takes the right.  The passageway isn’t quite tall enough for him to crouch, but it’s bigger than the previous one, and dim light glows through the grate at the far end of it that Dean knows opens into the boiler room.  He picks a spot about halfway down the passage toward the grate, aiming to be able to hear what’s going on in both the boiler room and further into the ventilation system, and have equally ready access to flee in either direction if it seems prudent.  He settles himself in a seated position, rolling his eyes aloft just as Cas’s omnipresent voice intones, _“two, one…and time’s up.  Now you’re on_ my _time, boy.  I look forward to seeing just exactly how much of it you manage to waste.”_

Dean shudders a little.

And now, the game _really_ begins.


	6. Say Anything

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Voiceovers are _so_ passe.

Releasing a silent, slightly shaky breath, Dean tips his wrist to glance at the iridescent hands of his watch, determined to keep track of how he’s doing on time.  It’s 3:19 PM, and if he can manage to stay holed up in here safely until 3:56, he’s home free.  Thirty-seven minutes, and if Dean were watching a movie or cooking or hell, even fucking, it would pass in the blink of an eye.  Right now it feels like absolute eons, as he watches the second hand crawl impossibly slowly around his watch face.

He hasn’t consciously realized that he was expecting Cas to go radio silent when the countdown was over until the angel’s voice rings out once more, startling him nearly as much as it did that first time.

 _“Second-guessing yourself yet?  Have you begun to doubt the strategy you settled on?  Should you have run further, hidden better, simply surrendered yourself and hoped for mercy?”_ Cas’s voice is musing, deceptively casual, as though it’s not intended to produce exactly the sort of second-guessing he refers to.  _“So difficult, in these moments,”_ he goes on, _“not to armchair linebacker yourself.”_

Dean has to smack his hand over his own mouth to stifle the bark of laughter that wants to escape.  He means armchair quarterbacking, of course, but despite his best efforts, Dean’s been fairly unsuccessful in teaching Cas to keep football positions straight.  Still, considering some of his attempts at idioms, this one was reasonably successful.  He got the right sport, at least, and there’s even an argument to be made that he used the saying appropriately—although Dean’s not entirely certain that it’s possible to armchair quarterback _yourself._ In any event, he manages to get the very dangerous urge to giggle under control before it occurs to him to wonder whether maybe, just this once, Cas fucked up the idiom intentionally.  He knows how much his tendency to muck up clichés amuses Dean.  Was he aiming to startle Dean into the exact laugh that he barely managed to suppress?  Nobody plays mind games like Cas plays mind games when he’s in Big Bad Wolf mode.

 _“And,”_ Cas continues, tone of voice almost lazy, _“of course now you must do battle with yourself over whether you_ want _to be caught.  True, the longer you elude me, the less time you have coming with the hairbrush, but then again, the longer I hunt for you, the more time I have to think up all manner of creative ways to make up for the swats I must deduct from your total.”_

Dean straightens, hand falling away from his mouth as a nearly-silent breath huffs from him.  That’s not _fair!_ The game was to escape Cas as long as possible.  Dean’s prize for success is supposed to be a reprieve, not ever more creative torments!  He scowls at the blank metal wall in front of him as if it can somehow transmit his outraged disapproval to Cas, and maybe it succeeds because a moment later the voice is back, laced with ill-hidden amusement.  _“Two minutes gone, Dean, and your total is down to 104.  Are you pleased?  Or have I instead given you a brand new angle to consider, a brand new injustice to chafe at?  Perhaps you have a point.  Perhaps I am being cruel.  You have never dealt well with uncertainty.  What do you think?  Will you feel better, knowing what punishments, what humiliations, what penance I am constructing for you?  Or should I keep my thoughts to myself?  Mmm…just this once, I will give you a freebie.  If you have an answer for me, pray it aloud.  I vow not to use it to pinpoint your location.”_

Dean blinks a couple times.  Well, _that’s_ unexpected.  It’s also a goddamn golden opportunity, and while he really ought to know better, the narration that’s chased him through the halls and ventilation shafts has him on edge enough that Dean doesn’t take a second to register that he’s bypassed his filter altogether until the words are already out.

“Now I lay me down to hide / In hopes of saving my backside / Go shove your false offers of help / I pray to Cas, go fuck yourself.”

He’s never particularly considered himself a wordsmith—that’s much more Sam’s territory—but he’s gotta admit there’s a certain poetry to his…well, poem.  On the other hand…oh, _shit,_ he just told Castiel, Angel of the fucking Lord, to go fuck himself.

Oops.

Apparently, the only one more startled by this response than Dean himself is Cas, because there’s a moment of silence that’s…not quite silent.  It’s a little like being on an open phone line when nothing’s happening on the other end.  Cas is there, and the connection is open, but he’s been stunned into wordlessness.  Despite the fact that Dean’s pretty sure he’s about as fucked as he’s ever been in his life (which is saying something, because he’s spent a hell of a lot of time with a cock up his ass), he takes a second to savor the air of shock that permeates the quiet.  It stretches on for a good fifteen or twenty seconds before Cas finally speaks up.

 _“My goodness,”_ he says mildly—though Dean’s not fooled by the apparent ease in his tone, _“that was rather more colorful than what I was expecting.  I must applaud you for creativity—not to mention successfully delaying me, as I will admit to being taken aback enough to briefly halt my search.  You should be proud of that.  As you know, I am not easily surprised.”_ There’s a pause, but Dean’s completely sure Cas isn’t done.

He’s right.

 _“But oh, my boy,”_ the angel goes on, the mildness in his voice replaced by an intent darkness laced with a razor-sharp edge of cruelty, _“you should make sure to savor the taste of victory now, because you’ll be far too busy sobbing apologies and begging for mercy—through your gag—when I get my hands on you.”_

The warmth of the metal behind and below him does nothing to dispel the full-body chill that overtakes Dean.  Holy _shit._ He’s gonna end up regretting those ill-considered words, he’s completely sure of that.  Even if he makes it through the entire 37 minutes, Cas will find some creative way (or, like, twelve of them) to make Dean extraordinarily sorry for that bit of sass.

If he thought it’d do any good, he’d start praying apologies right now, but the reprieve Cas gave him on locating him by prayer or voice has surely expired by now, and anyway, this is one bell that can’t be unrung.  You don’t tell Castiel to go fuck himself.  Not if you’re Dean Winchester.  You just…don’t.  It’s reckless to the point of near-suicidality, and it’s not like he wasn’t already in trouble to begin with.

 _“You know,”_ Cas speaks up again, after a pause more than long enough for Dean to start panicking, _“you have already eluded me for six whole minutes.  Eighteen swats down, Dean, leaving your total at 92.  That’s really rather impressive.  With that in mind, I believe I will offer you an additional prize.  At 37 minutes, you escape the hairbrush.  If you can make it to 45—only an additional eight minutes—I will forget all about that extraordinarily ill-advised ‘prayer,’ if it can even be called that.  And if you bypass that and reach a full hour, I promise to allow you to come—in any manner of your choosing.  Want me to blow you?”_ Dean takes a single moment to be grateful that he’s finally broken Cas of the tendency to use the word “fellate” in everyday discussion of that particular sex act, _“Want to fuck me?  You can have any of it—if you can make it a full hour.  Fifty-four minutes to go, and you had best hope that time flies as it never has.”_

This time, when Cas stops speaking, the silence is absolute.  The open connection he was maintaining is gone, and Dean wonders whether he’s done speaking altogether.

Jesus Christ, the idea of escaping punishment altogether—of getting to bend Cas over and fuck _him_ at the close of this particular exercise in making Dean go grey prematurely—well, he certainly can’t say it’s not attractive.  They don’t switch often, which is just fine with Dean, but it also means any time they do it’s quite the treat.  And to get to do that today of all days?  When he knows Cas is just _aching_ to take him apart piece by piece?  Well, shit, it might be worth the payback Cas will manage to deliver in spades, if it plays out that way.  On the other hand, Dean’s not stupid; he knows the odds of actually getting that far are vanishingly small—but damn, is it a lovely thought.

Another minute goes by as Dean muses on this, and time is _definitely_ not flying, because he’s pretty sure he’s aged at least a year and a half in the course of those sixty seconds.  The next minute doesn’t go any faster, and at this point Dean’s pretty sure that Cas is done talking.

Which is probably why he starts speaking again a scant ten seconds later.

 _“Two more minutes gone.  Are you beginning to wonder if perhaps I’ve underestimated you?  Part of you must have expected that I’d have you within the first minute, two at the most.  Are you beginning to dare to hope?  Or did you think perhaps that silence meant I was getting close—maybe even within earshot, and was determined not to tip you off if you heard my real voice underlying the resonance?”_ He is silent for a few moments, and then a soft laugh echoes around Dean, making him shiver again.  _“Well.  If you weren’t wondering before, now you will be.  Won’t you, my little escapee?”_

Since he mentions it— _yes._ Now Dean _will_ be fucking wondering if Cas already has his location worked out and is circling ever nearer, tightening the net.  His heartrate, which never really slowed down to begin with, kicks back up, and while he manages to force himself to breathe evenly, he can’t quite erase the shakiness in the breaths that sound impossibly loud to his own ears.

Time ticks onward, another two minutes crawling by, and now Dean’s down to 27 minutes—or 35, or 50, depending upon what goal he’s aiming toward.  Somehow he’s managed a whole ten minutes, and _now_ is when he actually starts to hope.  Ten minutes is more than long enough for Cas to have gotten anywhere in the bunker.  Twice.  If he hasn’t found Dean yet, it’s because he didn’t immediately sort out where to look, and it makes Dean think that just maybe, he actually has a chance at this.  Maybe Cas’s silence has nothing to do with his imminent approach and everything to do with trying to unnerve Dean enough that he’ll give up his hiding spot and foolishly reveal himself.

Another two minutes gone—not to mention a whole 34 swats, which is a hell of a lot of hairbrush not to have to deal with—and Dean is starting to feel just a touch smug.  This was a kick-ass hiding spot.  Kind of a stroke of genius, really, to make use of Cas’s ignorance of Sam’s erstwhile haunt.  Even if Cas does come check out the boiler room, there’s no reason he’d think to check out that particular ventilation shaft versus any others, and even an angel of the Lord can only perform a really thorough search so quickly.

Yeah, the more he thinks about it, the more certain Dean is that— _wait._

_What the hell was that?_


	7. Sorry!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No, seriously. The house _always_ wins.

Dean freezes solid, holding his breath, wishing he could temporarily halt the jackrabbit beat of his heart to silence the pulse pounding in his ears.  From somewhere deep in the ventilation system, there’s just a hint of… _something._ Not quite a noise, more of a…vibration. 

Or…is he imagining it?  Maybe he’s imagining it.  Cas’s head-games are just starting to really get to him at last, and—

 _Shit._ He definitely didn’t imagine _that._

The next vibration is a hell of a lot less subtle, and now Dean is absolutely certain.  Someone is in the ventilation system with him, much too heavy to be the skitter of an insect or the scrabble of a rodent, and there’s only one other human (well, humanoid) in the bunker with him.  _Fuck._ So much for that perfect plan.

Dean is paralyzed by indecision for what feels like hours but is actually no more than ten seconds, according to the watch that now seems to mock him.  Does he stay put and hope that Cas doesn’t happen down this particular tunnel, or does he make a break for it, slip out of the grate and try to hunt down a new hiding spot?   Just as he’s starting to think he’s better off staying put, the vibration comes for a third time, a hell of a lot closer—and this time, it’s accompanied by the slightest whisper of a sound, as if of a trenchcoat sliding across metal.

 _Nope._ Abort mission.  Time to get the fuck out of dodge.

Dean doesn’t spare a glance behind him—he doesn’t want to see the moment that Cas comes around the corner, doesn’t want to get frozen by the ice in that impossibly blue gaze.  He moves as quickly as he can without sacrificing some measure of stealth, because if Cas just happens to be blundering closer to him by chance, Dean sure as shit doesn’t want to tip his hand.  It takes him seconds to reach the grate, but this particular duct is far enough off the floor that he can’t just tip out of it head-first.  He’ll end up smashing his face on the concrete floor, and there’s no better way to torpedo an afternoon of fun (however terrifying, this is still some of the most fun Dean’s had in _ages)_ than an orbital fracture.

At the last second, he wriggles around, aiming to slide out of the duct feet-first and lower himself down until he’s only a couple feet off the ground.  As he nudges open the grate, the same sound comes again, a good deal louder.  Dean’s heart is in his throat, pulse throbbing through his temples and thundering in his ears.  He can feel the noose tightening, but if he can just get out of here before Cas reaches him, he can hit the ground running.  He can at least earn himself another minute or two.   He can—

Dean’s instincts are usually pretty solid.  He’s come to trust them implicitly over the years, and it’s a testament to how turned around Cas has him that the tiny alarm doesn’t start going off in his head until way too late.

He’s a little over halfway out of the grate, already starting to lower himself down when something—he’ll never be able to say exactly what—brings him up short, tells him to get his ass back inside the ventilation system.  Despite the fact that he’s barely moved in the last 13 or 14 minutes, the tension and terror have left him as wrung out as if he’d been sprinting the entire time.  His arms shake as he makes a token effort to pull himself back up, but gravity’s taken hold, and a moment later, something else has, too.

The fingers that close around his ankle are bruising, the grasp iron, and Dean’s first instinct isn’t toward self-preservation. If it was, he would be breaking into frantic apologies for the whole go-fuck-yourself thing, begging mercy, blaming it on a lousy night’s sleep, or insufficient calories, or hell, Mercury being in retrograde.

As it is, when he finally gives up the ghost and lets himself tumble toward the ground (it doesn’t occur to him for a single second to worry that Cas won’t catch him; he would never let Dean fall), he’s too stuck on the way Cas just outmaneuvered him to start groveling.

“That was a goddamned dirty trick!” He insists hotly, then grunts hard as he finds himself suddenly going ass over teakettle.  He’s pretty sure it would’ve been impossibly easy for Cas to catch him in a bridal hold, but nope, the angel is having none of it, and the shoulder that lands in his midsection knocks the wind out of him enough that he’s too busy trying to drag in a breath to continue his complaints.

Anyway, he’s got bigger and a good deal more painful concerns half a second later, as the flat back of the oval wooden hairbrush falls across his ass three times, the sharp cracks echoing through the cavernous boiler room.  _“Shit, OW!  Cas!”_

“That,” Castiel says firmly, “was strategy, Dean.  I was herding you, and it worked like a charm.  The fact that you fell for it is entirely on you.  You are well aware of my capabilities, yet it never occurred to you to wonder whether it might be a trick?  Silly boy.”  He punctuates this assessment with another three whacks—on the same cheek—and goddamn, he is _not_ pulling his swats.  Dean gasps, hands clenching into fists in the back of the familiar trenchcoat.  He barely notices that Cas is moving with quick strides until suddenly he’s again in motion, almost too fast to process.  He’ll be damned if he knows how Cas somehow managed to smoothly transfer him from over the shoulder to over the knee, but sure enough, Cas is seated solidly in a wooden chair whose legs Dean recognizes extraordinarily well (he’s spent a fair amount of time looking at them from precisely this angle), and Dean himself is draped over one of his knees.  Before he can try to scramble up, the angel has thrown his other leg over both of Dean’s, neatly putting to rest any hopes of kicking or squirming his way free.

 _“Cas!”_ Dean hisses, unsure of what he’s trying to accomplish.  It doesn’t much matter, because a few seconds later that cursed hairbrush is falling again, hard and fast, each crack shattering the silence with all the devastating effect of a gunshot.  Dean loses count almost instantly but it’s at least ten smacks before Cas pauses, and the voice that comes out is more dangerous than all the deadly beasts that Dean’s faced over his years of hunting put together. 

 _“What_ did you call me, little boy?”

 _“Sir!”_ Dean practically shouts, gasping for breath, the janging nerves in his ass shrieking their protest at the rough treatment.

“Those,” Cas informs him, “were in payment for the disrespect and don’t count toward your total.”

Dean opens his mouth to protest, but it’s in vain.  He doesn’t manage to get a single word out before something is shoved into his mouth.  He caught a flash of white, but not long enough to know what Cas has just gagged him with.  Before he has the chance to try to spit it out, Cas’s familiar tie is stretched across his mouth, fitting itself between his teeth.  Cas ties it off securely at the back of his head, and Dean finds himself incapable of more than a wordless whine of protest.

“As promised,” Cas tells him easily, “and now you will have to hold up your end.  I recall predicting sobbed apologies and incoherent pleas for mercy.  I look forward to seeing how quickly I can earn them.”

Dean’s muffled whimper seems to delight Cas, who skates a finger down his ass crack idly, making him jump.

“Now then.  Six swats before you landed over my knee, and those _did_ count toward your total, so let me see.  You managed thirteen and a half minutes.  I was intending to be generous and round up, but that was before your charming response to my earnest attempt to solicit your input.  Shockingly, I am not feeling particularly generous at the moment.  Rounding down it is.”

Dean makes a sound that skates the line between pleading and indignant protest, and earns himself a sharp smack—from Cas’s _hand,_ which means it doesn’t fucking count—at the seam of ass and thighs.  Cas carries on as if nothing happened, “So.  Thirteen minutes means you earned an impressive 39 swats off your total, leaving you with 71 to account.  Six down, 65 to go.  Is there anything you wish to say to me?”  He pauses just long enough for a few seconds of Dean’s outraged silence, then laughs good-naturedly.  “Goodness, I almost forgot.  You _can’t_ speak, can you?  Pity.  If you could, perhaps if you had pled prettily enough, it might have moved me to mercy.  You remember your signal?”  Dean nods once, jerkily, tapping Cas’s ankle three times in demonstration, and Cas slides a hand gently through his hair, just once.  “Good boy.  Use it if you need it.”

Dean nods again, wrapping his hand around Cas’s ankle and squeezing, confirming that he’s okay, that he’s into this, that—holy _fuck._

Housekeeping attended to, Cas wastes no more time in getting down to business.  He seems to feel that Dean is still warmed up enough from twenty minutes ago, and sets directly to work with the hairbrush, laying smack after merciless smack across Dean’s upturned and vulnerable bottom.  Dean is jerking with every swat, squirming before Cas hits ten, writhing before he breaks fifteen, cries muffled in the gag.  Cas isn’t going easy, isn’t tempering his smacks in light of how many he plans to deliver.  No, he’s delivering a message and he seems to have every intention of assuring that it sinks in.

It’s totally sinking in.

Cas finally pauses sometime around what must be swat twenty or maybe several hundred, and as the reverberations of the most recent smack echo into silence, the surface of the hairbrush slides almost delicately across Dean’s howling flesh.  Dean’s harsh breathing seems almost painfully loud to him.  “Twenty-eight down, 43 to go,” Cas says, “but since you enjoyed our game so much, I thought perhaps we might play another one.”

Dean groans, long and low, sagging over Cas’s lap.  Another game?  There’s no way this ends well for him.  No fucking wa—  “Up,” Cas says, and Dean blinks stupidly down at the floor. _What?_   “I said get _up,”_ the angel hisses, punctuating the instruction with two sharp cracks of the hairbrush that Dean will bet damn near anything don’t count toward his total, although they certainly count toward the total his ass is keeping.  He wastes no more time in scrambling to his feet, staring in total bewilderment at Cas.

The angel rises smoothly, seizing the back of Dean’s neck and frog-marching him to the wall.  He turns Dean to face it and plants him there, nose no more than a scant inch away from the smooth concrete surface.  “You will remain _precisely_ there.  Do not move.  If you have shifted so much as a single inch by the time I return, you will regret it even more than you are already regretting some of your most recent decisions.  Do I make myself perfectly clear?”  The threat in his voice is enough to send a shudder down Dean’s spine.  Cas chases it with a single finger, bumping over each vertebra in a way that would feel good if it weren’t so terrifying.

Dean nods vigorously, mumbling out what would be a “yes, Sir” if he was actually capable of constructing words through the gag.  Cas huffs out a pleased breath and then his warmth is gone from Dean’s back, leaving Dean yet again trying to figure out what in the living fuck just happened.

Another game, indeed.  Dean doesn’t know what Cas is planning on, but he doubts the fact that he actually needs to go _get_ something to do it bodes well.

It takes him a solid thirty seconds to actually parse that Cas has left him completely alone despite the fact that Dean is a known flight risk, especially this afternoon.  The fact that he seems to feel his threats are sufficient to keep Dean in place kind of feels like an insult to his honor, insofar as it’s possible to have honor with your bright pink ass throbbing and your saliva soaking into whatever the hell makeshift gag your boyfriend stuffed in your mouth.

As soon as the thought occurs, he’s moved, pivoting to look over his shoulder and see whether Cas is just waiting at his back.  He’s not, and that’s when Dean realizes that he’s already broken Cas’s dictate not to move so much as a single inch.  He’s pretty sure that no matter how much he tries, he won’t be able to get himself back in _exactly_ the same spot he was before, and Cas will know instantly that Dean’s moved.

And…well, shit, if he’s already gonna pay for moving, he might as well make it a lot more interesting than an inch or two.

Without a second thought, Dean whirls away from the wall and makes for the door at a dead run.

Game’s on.


	8. Go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean has a learning curve. It might be kind of steep.

This time, he doesn’t give much thought to strategy.  Any head start he has is likely to be negligible and anyway, all that crawling and sitting hunched over has Dean itching to _move._ So he’ll run as far and as fast as he can, work out some of that nervous energy, and when he’s inevitably caught, at least he’ll have really made Cas work for it.

His assumption is that whatever Cas intended to fetch probably lives with their impressive selection of toys—a wide-ranging collection from cock rings to paddles to plugs, more than diverse enough for Cas to have a really endless permutation of scenarios with which to torture Dean.  He can’t let himself focus too much on that right now, though, or he’ll get so caught up in the delicious terror (if you’d asked him ten years ago, he’d have said unequivocally that terror could _not_ be delicious, yet here he is) of not knowing what happens next that he’ll be paralyzed.

Anyway, the point is, Cas has to have gone up two floors, back to the main level, in order to get whatever it is he needs, and that means Dean’s best bet if he doesn’t want to run headlong into him around some corner is to head downward.  With an eye toward not being _too_ obvious, he doesn’t make for the nearest staircase, instead dodging down a particularly narrow passageway toward a back stair that sees virtually no use.

It’s been long enough since anyone was over here that a couple of the already dim safety lights have burnt out, and Dean makes a mental note to replace them in the next day or two, huffing a brief laugh at the juxtaposition of this moment of mundane domesticity with the thrill of the chase.  It doesn’t slow him down any, though, and he careens down the dark staircase, pausing for a moment at the bottom to glance back and forth between his two options.  The passageway ahead of him is brightly lit (well—as brightly lit as any of the bunker’s lower hallways), the one to his right is dim—maybe another couple burned out bulbs?  Either way, Dean figures if Cas comes looking for him and is moving fast enough, he might miss Dean altogether in a pool of shadows.  Likely?  Well, no, but he’s gotta go with any possible edge he might have.

Dean turns down the dimmer hallway and sets off at a run.  Several halls branch off this one, but they’re both significantly brighter than his current path, so he skips them, following this hall until it ends, obliging him to turn left into a hallway that seems inordinately bright after the previous one.  Thankfully, no more than twenty feet further down, there’s another fork and one of his options is even dimmer than the last hallway.  He takes it without a second thought, although he’s forced to slow down a little to make sure he doesn’t trip over something in the low light.

It’s not until he makes two more turns, continuing to avoid the brightest paths, that it occurs to him that this particular hallway is more familiar than some of the others.  And _that’s_ when he catches a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye, something moving through one of the brighter patches ahead of him. 

_Shit._

Just to his right is a doorway, leading into a pitch-black room.  With no time to debate the wisdom of retreating versus hiding, Dean goes with his gut and ducks inside the room.  There’s just enough light spilling in from the hallway to dimly illuminate the four or five feet radius around the door.  It’s not much, but it’s enough, and Dean knows almost instantly what room he’s in.

There’s no goddamn way it’s a coincidence.

Yet again, he’s allowed himself to be led directly into a trap.

Sure enough, as if by magic, the lights flicker on to reveal Castiel some twenty feet in front of him, visible through the open storage shelves that reveal the usually hidden room beyond.  The way he is leaning against the table with arms lightly crossed over his chest would be casual, even lazy under other circumstances, but the hint of a satisfied smirk adorning his face shifts the narrative from one of indolence into one of mocking triumph.  Dean starts to whirl back toward the exit, not exactly holding out much in the way of hope. 

As expected, before Dean can move so much as a single inch (and isn’t that its own level of irony, considering the instructions he lately ignored) Cas’s eyes flick up and at the door.  It slams shut with a resounding thud, leaving Dean staring at the end of his final escape attempt.  He knows better than to think there’s any chance of wrestling it back open.  Nope, he’s well and truly trapped, hemmed into a space far too small to flee or hide, finally and entirely at the mercy of the predator who has hunted him through the bunker.  Dean turns slowly back around to face the angel who awaits him in the dungeon, the pounding of his heart in his ears having much more to do with the slight smile on Cas’s face than his own breakneck flight through the lower levels.

“Well then,” Cas says idly, not yet making a move, “are you quite finished?”

Dean nods once, slowly, and Cas chuckles a little as those blue eyes rake him from tip to toe.  Dean knows what he must look like—still gagged, cock hard against his belly, chest heaving with the speed of his breathing.  He’s likely ghastly pale too, since he’s pretty sure the color all drained from his face in the moment when he realized that he’d once again been neatly and expertly manipulated into stepping directly into a trap.  No wonder Cas is so enjoying the sight of him.

Dean would swear he’s watching Cas so closely nothing should get by him, but somehow the clap of the angel’s hands still makes him jump, startled.

“Excellent!” Cas exclaims, almost jovial, “then we can get back down to business.”  He must spot the question in Dean’s cocked head, because he huffs out another laugh and nods firmly once.  “And yes, in answer to your unspoken question, I _was_ responsible for the state of the lighting.”  He clearly sees the hint of outrage in Dean’s eyes—that’s a lot of goddamn lightbulbs to blow out, and the fucking things are neither cheap nor easy to replace—because he goes on almost immediately.  “There will be no need to replace any bulbs.  I think you’ll find they all work perfectly when you exit the room—if you still have the use of your legs, and enough energy or mental space to spare for such concerns.”  The deceptively casual way he adds that last bit does nothing to fool Dean, who finds himself shivering despite the relative warmth of the room’s air.

“Now,” Cas says, “I would strongly recommend you do not make me come get you, although I assure you that I will be more than happy to do so.”

Dean believes him.  Swallowing hard past the saliva-soaked gag in his mouth, he takes one slow step forward, then another, having to force himself to move.  It’s like walking toward the bloody firing squad; you’re gonna end up with a bullet in the head either way, and there’s something to be said for maintaining at least the modicum of dignity getting there under your own steam provides, but your body hasn’t necessarily gotten the memo.  Dean actually makes it about halfway to Cas before he registers what he’s seeing.  Resting on the table behind Cas is a towel—one that Dean assumes conceals whatever he went to get—but beside it is something that looks awfully familiar.  Dean pauses, squinting at Cas, and finds that he’s right.  Cas isn’t wearing his belt, and its whereabouts are confirmed when the angel unerringly reaches out a hand to scoop up the already doubled leather strap, letting it hang loosely from his grasp.

That’s about where Dean’s determination to accept defeat gracefully goes to hell, and without quite planning on it he finds that he’s taken two hasty steps back.  The ferocious gleam this produces in Cas’s eyes might make Dean reconsider, but Cas doesn’t give him the chance.  In the blink of an eye, he’s across the room, his free hand tightening around Dean’s upper arm, yanking him none-too-gently from the main room, through the open secret door, and into the dungeon proper.

Dean pulls against the grasp not because he thinks he’s actually got a chance in hell of getting away but simply because he can’t _not,_ and in response the fingers clamp still harder, digging what will ultimately be finger-shaped bruises into Dean’s bicep.  The whimper that escapes actually startles him more than Cas, and the almost surreal sense that’s overtaken him as he stares at the belt dangling from Cas’s other hand makes it seem to come from afar, despite the fact that he knows logically his own mouth produced the muffled sound.

“I do love that sound,” Cas observes, dragging a stumbling Dean over toward the lone hard-backed chair the dungeon boasts.  It’s been some time since the room has seen a prisoner (except, Dean supposes, himself in moments like these), and he’s pretty sure the chair is in exactly the same place it was left the last time Cas hauled him down here.  He fully expects to end up in the same, all-too-familiar position—draped across Cas’s lap—so it takes half a second to recognize what’s happening when instead, Cas simply plants a single foot on the seat of the chair and effortlessly bends Dean across his upraised knee.

Seriously?  He’s not even gonna bother to sit _down?_

Cas knows how Dean feels about this particular position.  There’s something…additional about it.  It has all the juvenile implications of being over someone’s lap, with the added humiliation of knowing you’re so easily pinned that it requires nothing more than an upraised leg and a pinning arm to keep you in place.  There’s something shamefully titillating about it—he loves it, but he absolutely _loathes_ that he does.  Contradictory? Maybe.  No less true, for all that.

In any event, Dean now finds himself with ass once again uppermost and achingly (in the literal sense) vulnerable—and not just to the damn hairbrush this time.  To the fucking _belt._

They only really started to experiment with really heavy belt use last winter, but they’ve made up for lost time in spectacular fashion since then.  They’ve played with number of strokes, placement (Cas really enjoys what it’s capable of doing to Dean’s inner thighs.  Dean does not), relative force, positions—the point is, Dean’s no stranger to the thing, and although it’s been several weeks since it last came out to play, it turns out he’s more than capable of taking well upwards of twice the strokes they maxed out at last winter.

Does this mean Cas is shifting Dean’s remaining count from the hairbrush to the belt?  Does he have forty-fucking-three stripes coming?  Or—no.  No, he can’t possibly be intending to—

As it turns out, yes.  Yes, he can.  As usual.

“So,” Cas says, “I thought we would begin by dealing with that little stunt, and then we can move on to completing the remainder of your _actual_ punishment.”  Dean groans as loudly as he can, but Cas simply forges on as if he’d made no sound.  “I’d have you count them off, but sadly, my shirt and tie are currently preventing that.  Instead, I will simply have to enjoy the bevy of delightfully muffled noises I can produce.”  His _shirt._ That’s what Cas fucking stuffed into his mouth, and now that he mentions it, Dean can see that one of its tails has been torn jaggedly away, no doubt in the heat of the moment to create the makeshift gag.

That shouldn’t be nearly as hot as it is.

Dean whimpers, feeling the blood already rushing to his head.  The other thing about this particular position is that it puts him at a much sharper angle than the standard over-the-knee does, leaving him feeling a little addled.  It’s one of the reasons Cas never keeps him like this for too long.  They learned that the hard way, when Dean embarrassed the shit out of himself (and not the fun kind of embarrassment) by nearly passing out when Cas stood him back up after a very long session over one propped up knee.

He doesn’t have much time to think on that, though, before the familiar sound splits the air before finding its mark across the fullest part of Dean’s ass.  He grunts, hands scrabbling for purchase and finding nothing to grasp onto, and it turns out the really brutal thing about being gagged for this is that, with no chance of Dean counting off strokes or thanking him, Cas sees no reason to provide any kind of real pause between the hits.

The second comes on the heels of the first, earning a muffled yelp, and when the third lands unerringly at the seam of ass and thighs, Dean’s too wrapped up in the pain to feel embarrassed about the fact that he’s started kicking like a little kid.

When he’s able to get his wits back about him, he’ll realize that Cas _was_ pulling these strokes, careful not to use anything like the maximum force he’s capable of, nor even the maximum force he’s been known to employ.  He clearly wants to save some of Dean’s ass for the hairbrush, but overtop what that accursed brush has already done, the strokes feel no less brutal than if they were ten of the best.

While they may not be the best, there are indeed ten of them, and by the time Cas is finished, there are tears standing out in Dean’s eyes, his grunts and yelps replaced by a steady whining that would embarrass the fuck out of him if he had mental space left for that sort of thing.  All the while, Cas holds him down with a single palm at the center of his back, his attempts to squirm and kick totally ineffective when faced with the sheer bodily strength a seraph boasts.

It takes Dean a moment or two to realize that the belt has stopped falling, and when Cas’s fingers start sliding lightly up and down his spine, his whines wind down into harsh breaths.  “You took those well,” the angel tells him, as if he had any goddamn choice in the matter, then lets Dean slide back to his feet, grunting a little as just the reverberation of his soles hitting the floor draws bitter complaints from the tender backs of his thighs.  “Now show me what a good boy you can be and bend over the table and spread your cheeks.”


	9. Dungeon!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He's quite serious. And don't call him Shirley.

Dean blinks hard several times, staring blankly at Cas.  Seriously?  Ten strokes of the belt and now he wants Dean to dig his own fucking hands into his thoroughly strapped and spanked ass to give him access to— _seriously?_

“Yes, I’m quite serious,” Cas tells him serenely, effortlessly reading his question from his expression, and if Dean were either a braver or a stupider man, this is where he’d make a face.  As it is, he opts to gaze plaintively at Cas, trying to channel Sam’s gift for puppy dog eyes.  All it gets him is a laugh and a firm, open-palmed slap on the side of one thigh, urging him to follow instructions.  Knowing better than to think that Cas is likely to let another delay slide, Dean shuffles forward and obediently bends forward over the table, shuddering a little as his chest makes contact with the cold metal. 

That’s the easy part.  Now he’s supposed to actually reach back and grab the flesh that already feels at least three times its usual size, and he finds himself instead offering up a pleading whine.  He can feel Cas step up close behind him, and tenses in anticipation of a blow that doesn’t come.  Instead, Cas sweeps his palm down Dean’s back in a gesture that somehow manages to be soothing and ominous simultaneously.  It’s followed by the dance of fingertips back up along his spine, light enough that it nearly sets Dean to a whole different type of squirming, and _fuck,_ if Cas is gonna start _that_ , too, Dean doesn’t know what the hell he’s gonna do.  The threat in the too-gentle touch is implicit, and it’s enough to motivate Dean to reach back, cringing, and set his own fingers against the swells of irritated flesh.  He doesn’t bother to suppress the wince the pressure draws out of him—Cas will enjoy it, anyhow, and Dean figures that all else aside, the guy’s probably earned a bit of a show—as he pulls his cheeks apart.

Cas hums approvingly, and Dean’s pretty damn sure he never heard the click of a cap, but suddenly a single slick fingertip teases at his rim.  He jumps a little, earning a cluck of disapproval, and he will forever insist the noise that the gag couldn’t entirely manage to silence was not a squeak.  Cas is generally kind enough not to call him on it, and anyway, all thoughts of what sounds he may or may not have made is chased rapidly out of Dean’s head as the fingertip nudges its way just inside, then pauses as if trying to decide whether or not to proceed.  Dean’s not fooled, and sure enough, a second or two later it slides home, seating itself fully.  For the first time, Dean’s actually a little grateful for the gag, because he can try to convince himself that it hides the positively wanton way he groans.  Cas’s chuckle is soft, appreciative, but there’s an unyielding core to it that tells Dean he’s unlikely to get the release his body (and God knows, his cock, which feels like it’s been hard for _years)_ is desperately in search of anytime soon.

The finger avoids his prostate, sliding free, but when it’s shortly joined by a second one, just as slick, the pair of them nudge deliberately at the sensitive bundle of nerves.  Dean whimpers openly, hips jerking a little—which causes his cock to bump lightly against the top of the table.  He gasps so hard he’s probably lucky he doesn’t inhale the sodden wad of Cas’s shirt and end the scene in spectacularly disastrous fashion, earning a low sound of appreciation from Cas.  “So _responsive,”_ the angel praises him, near-reverence in his tone, and Dean will never stop being amazed at the way Cas can make it so clear that he worships Dean while simultaneously thoroughly defiling him.  He makes a low sound in response—acknowledgment, plea, he doesn’t even know, and Cas rewards him—if you can call it that—by sliding his fingers free.  Dean loosens his grip on the loudly complaining flesh of his ass a little, figuring he has a moment’s reprieve while Cas slicks up whatever he’s planning on using next (Dean’s hoping for his cock but knows better than to expect it at this stage of the game), but the angel is wise to him.  All it takes is a low clearing of his throat to have Dean tightening his grip again, ensuring that his cheeks are spread widely enough to fully expose him to Cas’s attentions.

And _fuck,_ but the shame of that shouldn’t be nearly as intoxicating as it is.

Cas offers a low sound of approval that might have Dean preening under different circumstances, but at the moment his attention is otherwise occupied, because the distinctive feel of slick silicone is sliding inside him, but something about it isn’t quite what Dean was expecting.  He figured Cas planned on finishing up the spanking after inserting a plug, something that’s nowhere near out of the norm for them, but this…isn’t that.  He’d know the shape of a plug anywhere—God knows the muscles back there are more than accustomed to them—and this is a distinctly different shape.

Cas must read Dean’s slightly bewildered silence accurately, because he chuckles a little as he slides it further in.  It’s not really any bigger than a plug, but the angle is off, leaving its tip pressing directly against his prostate once Cas gets it fully seated, and—oh, son of a bitch.  He freezes again, as if the fucking toy’s visual acuity is based on movement, or maybe as if the angel’s is, but he’s wrong on both counts.  The toy doesn’t need to see anything and Cas has Dean exactly where he wants him.

Dean’s suspicions are proven quite correct a moment later when the low vibrations begin.  It’s a fucking prostate massager, and his boyfriend might be the most sadistic sonofabitch on the planet. 

The sound he makes is not one he’s willing to classify, mostly because it’s one of the most wanton things he’s ever heard, even through the gag.  Cas leaves the vibrations on for only a few seconds, clearly just illustrating a point, then turns them off, leaving Dean strung tight as a bow over the table, because he can pretty much cobble together what the shape of the rest of the afternoon is gonna look like, and he’s not sure if he wants to cry or beg Cas to get on with it.

As it happens, he doesn’t need to beg.  Cas is only too eager to get on with it without any prompting, and it turns out the position he’s forced Dean into was multipurpose, because before Dean can release the grip on his ass, Cas has seized his wrists.  He crosses them together effortlessly and uses the belt Dean’s already so well acquainted with to bind his hands snugly at the small of his back.  It all happened fast enough to leave Dean reeling, and the fact that Cas instantly pulls Dean upright and marches him right back to that fucking chair doesn’t help any.  It takes no time at all for Cas to be seated solidly in the chair, both feet planted on the floor, and then all it takes is a single yank and Dean tumbles forward over his knees, totally unable to arrest his fall without the use of his hands.  Cas catches him, of course, and neatly adjusts him just so, until Dean is sprawled over his lap.  A second later, Cas is pressing something small into his hand.  “Shake if you remember your signals,” he instructs smoothly, and Dean shakes the small cat toy, causing the bell inside it to jingle merrily.  Bound, gagged, and helpless he may be.  Without recourse, he is not.

Not for a single second does he think he’s going to need it.

After all this time, Cas knows exactly where the often-fine line between ‘oh God yes’ and ‘oh hell no’ lives for Dean, and is adept at marching him right along its precipice.

Dean’s affectionate musings about his level of trust for Cas are quickly put to rest by rather more pressing concerns, in the form of the cool flat of the hairbrush sliding gently over the curve of his ass.

“Very good,” Cas praises, “but we’re doing things a bit differently today.  When you’re on the verge of coming—and I do mean _on the verge;_ I will know if you try to tap out early to make it easier on yourself,” Cas says conversationally, “you will shake the toy once.  Drop it to pause, throw it to stop, as usual.”  Dean whines a little, because come on now, hasn’t he already suffered enough in the orgasm denial sense of the word?

Cas clearly doesn’t think so.

“Shake if you understand,” he instructs, and if it’s possible to shake a cat toy mutinously, that’s damn well what Dean does.

“Good boy,” Cas says.  “I assume it goes without saying that if you come without permission, I will be _extraordinarily_ displeased with you.  Let us just assume that in the event of such an occurrence, you should assume that will be your last orgasm for quite some time to come.  Am I understood?”  Dean shakes the toy again, just once, and Cas hums his approval once more.  “Now then,” the angel observes, “I believe you had 43 to go.”

Dean whines again, but it’s more a token protest than any real expectation of moving Cas to mercy.  After dousing him in ten feet of snow and making him come hunt for Dean three times (well, two times, really, since the middle one was all Cas’s idea), the angel’s mercy is in extremely short supply.

He proves this when the hairbrush falls on the undercurve of his left cheek.  The swat isn’t as brutal as the ones he was delivering earlier, but it’s no love tap either, and Dean feels it even more acutely thanks to the belt’s cameo.  The grunt it earns is almost immediately swallowed in a gasp as the goddamn massager starts its low vibrations one more.  Jesus _fuck,_ that’s intense.

Dean can feel his cock (which probably shouldn’t be able to maintain an erection for this long at his age, and Cas won’t ever give him a straight answer on whether angel mojo has anything to do with that), hard and leaking against Cas’s suit pants, and when the next smack falls, he really recognizes how diabolical this plan is.

The second stroke of the brush makes Dean jerk, rubbing his cock against Cas’s lap in friction that’s pretty dangerous considering the threats Cas has levied against his future orgasms—but that’s not all.  The pain makes Dean clench up, which pulls the prostate massager in, rubbing it more firmly against its target area and increasing the intensity of the vibrations.  Add onto that the sharp pleasure-pain of the hairbrush itself, and Dean’s not sure how the hell he’s gonna make it through another three strokes without going off like a volcano, let alone…how many does he have left?  Forty-one?

He is _so fucked._


	10. Can't Stop

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Whatever. Masculinity is overrated.

As it happens, Dean has underestimated himself _and_ Cas.  He actually makes it a whole _five_ strokes before he has to frantically jingle the cat toy.  The vibrations against his prostate stop instantly, as does the fall of the hairbrush, leaving Dean breathing hard, mournfully watching that already long-denied orgasm slip away from him yet again.  He’s walking a hard line here between waiting long enough that Cas won’t think he’s trying to make it too easy on himself and not waiting so long that there’s no stopping the oncoming climax.  It’s like trying to walk a balance beam when one side’s got a shark tank and the other a fucking snake pit (albeit a really pleasurable one, and fine, the analogy kind of fails, but it’s not like he’s operating with full mental capacity at the moment anyway).

He assumes that as soon as he’s calmed down enough to continue, Cas will start the massager back up and carry on with his swats, but it turns out the angel has a few other tricks up his sleeve.

When his breathing has slowed sufficiently, his muscles unknotting enough that Cas can see he’s no longer fighting back the urge to come, a palm strokes lightly over his back, as if in praise.  Dean relaxes into it—for about five seconds, right up until the palm is replaced by the too-light brush of fingertips, tracing the line of his shoulder blade over to his side, dangerously close to his armpit.  No no _no,_ anything but _this._

Dean’s best attempts at warning noises have absolutely no impact on Cas, who walks his fingers down Dean’s side, lingering for a moment at his waist, and despite his best efforts, Dean breaks out in goosebumps.  Cas makes a soft noise of enjoyment before, just for a second, the fingertips drive in a little harder, unerringly seeking out one of those _spots._

That’s when the squirming starts.

It’s not fair, really.

Dean spent a lot of years trying to train this out of himself, because if there’s one thing that’s not fucking manly, it’s squealing like a girl anytime someone digs a finger into your ribs or the back of your knee.  Macho dudes are _not fucking ticklish,_ okay?

Not okay, as it happens, because any progress he’d made in eliminating the incredible sensitivity he was cursed with was blown to shit pretty much the instant Cas realized how totally he could debilitate Dean with a single well-placed jab or a too-light graze of fingertips in particularly sensitive areas.

Now he uses the knowledge like a weapon and Dean will insist from now til the cows come home that he hates every second of it, but…there’s also _something._ Something about it that he can’t quite pinpoint.  He knows it’s related to the power play that already infuses everything they do.  Maybe it’s the juxtaposition of being entirely at Cas’s mercy and having the angel torture him with the gentlest of touches rather than the sharp smack of a hand or the harsh bite of a belt.  Maybe it’s the fact that Cas is so unbelievably good at managing the interplay of both; the brutality and the deceptive softness—because as much as the fucking _tickling_ (and Jesus Christ, it’s hard for Dean to even _think_ the word, let alone say it) might consist of soft touches, it’s every bit as brutal in its own way.

Whatever the case, he doesn’t exactly have the luxury of philosophizing about it at the moment, given the fact that Cas’s best instrument of torture—that deft _hand—_ has just slid lazily over the curve of his ass.  Just as Dean starts to steel himself for what he knows is coming (and there is really no overstating how deeply he regrets letting Cas in on how sensitive the inner crease of his thighs is), the vibration of the massager picks up again, and the hairbrush falls four times in rapid succession.

Dean is so shocked by the unexpected development that he actually makes it through without coming all over himself, although the gag is doing an increasingly poor job of concealing the yelps each smack earns.  He’s trying to remain relaxed so as to ease the dig of the massager against his prostate, but it’s not easy with the bite of the brush at hand, and it becomes even harder when Cas fulfills his earlier unspoken promise, sliding a single fingertip up the crease where Dean’s left thigh meets his groin.  It pulls a sound out of him that even Dean can’t call anything other than a squeak, makes him writhe, although he’s not sure whether he’s trying to throw off the finger or encourage it.  It doesn’t particularly matter anyway; Cas won’t be thrown off and he needs no encouragement.  Instead, the finger from hell simply adjusts its attentions to the other thigh, and Dean finds himself kicking at least as hard as he was at the stroke of the belt, trying to bite back the sharp noises that the gag is barely containing.  The way he's squirming is causing almost too much friction on his cock.  It’s making him only more aware of the sense of fullness produced by the massager, making it move in a decidedly _compelling_ way against his prostate, and when Cas decides to drive two fingertips mercilessly into that magical spot where ass, thigh, and groin all meet up, Dean shakes the fucking cat toy hard enough to summon curious felines from several states away—not only because of the instructions but because he flatly refuses to be _tickled_ to orgasm.  Never gonna happen.

The fingers fall away immediately, vibrations stopping, and Dean is left once again panting and tense over Cas’s knee, mumbling indecipherable pleas for mercy. 

He doesn’t get any.

No sooner has he wound down than the hairbrush starts its descent once more, and this time it cracks down at least ten times, hard and fast, delivering enough force to have Dean writhing in a whole new way.  If anyone asks, he will flatly deny that there were any tears in his eyes before the last near-miss (he won’t be tickled to tears either, thankyouverymuch) but there sure as shit are now.  He’s breathing hard, dragging air in through his nose, and Cas is kind enough to give him a brief pause.  He strokes Dean’s ass lightly, and ordinarily it might be soothing the sting a little, but not when those fingers have such easy and unencumbered access to so many highly sensitive areas.

Unsurprisingly, this is when the massager starts up again.

~*~

Three more near-orgasms, something like fifteen swats, and a whole lot of unwelcome fingers jabbing into Dean’s most intensely t-word-ish spots (fuck you, he doesn’t have to think it if he doesn’t want to) later, Dean is a writhing, whimpering, debauched mess of a man.  His ass feels five times its normal size, swollen and red and impossibly tender.  His cock has made an absolute mess of Cas’s lap with the precome he’s been leaking alone.  He’s cursed Cas up one side and down the other (thankfully obscured by the gag), and he’s not entirely sure when he started crying in earnest but those are definitely tears dripping onto the floor under his head.  Cas hesitates for a moment—and it’s definitely a hesitation, there’s a distinct difference between that and his deliberate pauses—and at the sound of Dean’s sniffle, the hairbrush is immediately set down on Dean’s back, freeing Cas’s hands to untie the tie that’s held the gag in place for the last millennium or so.  Dean takes this as the permission it is, spitting out the sodden gag and taking in a deep breath. 

He wasn’t so stuffed up that breathing was starting to become an issue—he’d have dropped the toy if it was—but if he’d done too much more crying it would’ve gotten there.

Apparently, Cas intends to see that he does more crying, and doesn’t plan on taking any chances with his safety.

Dean opens his mouth, but before he can say anything (whether acceptable or ill-advised), Cas is speaking.  “That was a sad necessity, although I will admit to rather enjoying the idea of hearing you beg more clearly.  Nevertheless, I’d recommend you keep a civil tongue in your head, or you can close out the evening in a cock cage, rather than with an orgasm.”

Oh, hell no.  Dean has no intention of earning himself any time in that horrible thing.  His voice is a little croaky, but easily understandable when he grates out a “yes, Sir.”

“That’s my good boy,” Cas says, and the words are casual but there’s such sincerity in the underlying note of pride that Dean feels warmed to the core.

He’s not sure how many smacks he still has coming to him, although he thinks it’s somewhere in the general vicinity of ten, but he’d happily take every single one of them right now and at full force if it meant Cas would spare him the— _shitshitshit!_

“Nonononono,” Dean whimpers as those fingers again dive at the tender crease of ass and thigh.  It’s a double assault, because the skin has been crisped by the hairbrush and belt enough that it fucking _hurts,_ but it’s the other sensations that are the really torturous ones.  He starts kicking without planning it, but Cas is undaunted, simply planting a hand on his back to steady him and carrying on.  “Please please _pleasepleasepleaseplease shit, Cas, I mean SIR! I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry!”_ There’s a brief pause and then the lap beneath Dean is shaking ever-so-slightly in a motion Dean is all too familiar with.

Cas is fucking _laughing at him._

Remembering the warning about the likely outcome of disrespectful speech, Dean literally bites his own tongue to keep himself quiet.  “No need to correct you for the mistake, I see, as you seem to have already recognized your folly,” Cas rumbles after a moment in which he was presumably getting himself back under control.  “So instead, let’s carry on.”

Dean whimpers for what has to be the hundredth time tonight, and that’s when the fucking massager kicks in yet again.  He whimpers, feeling as if he’s perpetually hovering on the edge of orgasm at this point, and Cas pulls him back off the precipice with a particularly brutal smack of the hairbrush.  The tears fall harder in its wake, and the next five swats do nothing to slow them.  Cas doesn’t stop there, though, hesitating only a moment before suddenly the fucking massager kicks into a higher gear (Jesus tap dancing Christ, the thing was on low the entire time?) just as the hairbrush falls again.  And again.  And again.

Dean shakes the toy hard and is stunned to discover that it makes only a dull clonking sound.  He clenched his fists so tightly he crushed the damn thing, apparently, but Cas gets the message nevertheless.  The vibrations halt, and this time, the hairbrush clatters to the floor carelessly at Cas’s side.

“Such a good boy.  Do you have any idea how many times you came back from the edge?  No matter.  I do, and you are _amazing._ I believe that kind of self-control deserves a reward, don’t you?”

Dean has to take a second to sniffle and blink hard, clearing some of the moisture in his eyes before he can respond.  “If—I—“

“No need to stand on ceremony,” Cas tells him kindly, recognizing that Dean was trying to sort out the properly respectful answer and getting nowhere.

“Oh God, yes Sir, please, _please.”_

Cas chuckles a little, then reaches down and helps Dean to his feet, steadying him and holding him up until he feels more solid.  Then he ushers Dean forward to the table once more and uses a strong hand to guide him gently back into bending over.

Dean squeaks (no shame this time, he has absolutely no room left for it at this point) as the massager nestled so firmly inside him is suddenly withdrawn unceremoniously, and for about the eighteenth time that night, he damn near comes on the spot.

“You can come as soon as I’m inside you,” Cas informs him, and Dean actually chokes out a sob of relief.  Thank God, because he’s barely been holding on for what feels like forever and he’s damn sure there’s no way he’ll be able to maintain any semblance of control with Cas buried in him.

Hell, the soft sound of the angel slicking his cock up is nearly enough to send him over the edge.  Seconds later, one firm hand settles on his hip just before Dean feels a blunt head nudging at his already slick and slightly loose rim.  Cas slides in smoothly, not brutal but not particularly gentle either, and Dean makes it precisely one more thrust (right up until Cas’s thighs nestle in close behind his ass and send the abused nerve-endings to screaming) before he shakes apart at the seams.

After such long denial, the orgasm is so strong that it whites out his vision for a long moment.  His legs give out from under him, forcing the surface beneath him to take his entire weight as his cock pulses against his stomach and the table.  It feels like it goes on forever, his ass clenching around the hot, hard length that’s _finally_ buried inside him.  The sounds he’s making could probably best be termed wails, and he actually thinks he might pass out.  Gives fucked into insensibility a whole new meaning.

In the end, he manages to hang onto the shambles of his own consciousness, and that only because he’s dimly registered that by some monumental force of will, Cas _hasn’t_ come yet, and Dean doesn’t want to miss a second of this.

“Gorgeous,” Cas says softly, fervently, and then both hands are clamping down with bruising force on Dean’s hips as he begins to fuck him in earnest.

Dean is loose-limbed and limp over the table, allowing his body to be rocked back and forth, back and forth by the force of the thrusts, allowing himself to simply be _used_ for Cas’s pleasure.  Every collision of those muscled thighs against his ass makes the flesh sing in delightful agony, and Dean’s not particularly surprised to find himself hard again in what would be an almost embarrassingly short time if he hadn’t just been edged within an inch of his life.

Somehow, Dean couldn’t say how, Cas must realize this, because he pants out words that make Dean groan, long and low and loud.  The filthy demands are choppy, the force of Cas’s thrusts breaking up his words a little, and damned if that isn’t one of the hottest things Dean’s ever heard.

“Are you going to come for me again, my boy?  Going to give it up once more?  I know you can.  Show me how much you love my cock.  Show me how much you love the way I _own_ you.”

And…yep.  That about does it.

Dean’s cock jerks again, and while not nearly as much pulses out of it, the sensation is scarcely less intense than the first one.

Best of all—this time it’s enough.  The clenching of his ass around the cock spearing him drags Cas over the edge along with.  He comes with a shout, fingertips digging cruelly into Dean’s hips for a second or two.

They come down slowly, the sudden quiet of the room marred only by their combined panting and Dean’s occasional sniffle.  A few moments pass as Cas collects himself (Dean doesn’t even bother to try; Cas can take care of collecting him, too), and then strong hands are carefully unfastening the belt, freeing Dean’s arms.   Gentle fingers pry his hand open and cast away the ruined toy, then carefully and slowly guide him upright.  He wavers on his feet, shaky and exhausted and completely undone by the culmination of the afternoon’s activities, but it’s no matter.

Cas effortlessly scoops him off his feet altogether and then they are striding through the hallways with Dean cradled against his chest.  It’s a familiar position, in the wake of an intense scene, and a welcome one.  That one creature can be so relentlessly brutal, so wickedly sadistic, and yet also so gentle, so tender—it should be a contradiction.  Somehow, it’s not; it’s simply two equally beloved sides of Dean’s beloved.

And Jesus, he probably doesn’t need to worry about his ticklishness being girly; this kind of sappiness easily trumps that in the less-than-masculine department.

Eh, fuck it.  Masculinity is overrated.  Chick flicks aren’t so bad, even Benny was kinda ticklish (ask him how he knows), and there’s nothing wrong with feeling sort of (oh, fine, extremely) sappy about the man you love.

~*~

Somewhat later, after Cas has gentled him through a bottle and a half of orange juice and a chocolate bar (which doesn’t actually go all that well with orange juice, for the record), Dean is curled up against his broad chest, enjoying the steady rise and fall of his breathing.  He’s not going to last much longer, but before he passes out, he needs to make one thing clear.

“Tomorrow,” Dean mutters, hovering on the edge of sleep, “I get to pick the game.”

Cas laughs quietly, brushing a kiss against each of his closed eyelids.  “Indeed, my love.  I cannot wait to see what you come up with.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last month, I was privileged to spend a weekend with some of the most wonderful voices in the Supernatural fandom. They are all authors in their own right, albeit some in different ways than others. Bella, [Deadmockingbirds](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Deadmockingbirds/pseuds/Deadmockingbirds), [LizardWhisperer](http://archiveofourown.org/users/LizardWhisperer/pseuds/LizardWhisperer), [chocolatedragon](http://archiveofourown.org/users/chocolatedragon/pseuds/chocolatedragon), it was an absolute privilege. [Dangerousnotbroken](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Dangerousnotbroken/pseuds/Dangerousnotbroken), your presence is not merely requested but required next time.
> 
> I love you all.
> 
> ~*~
> 
> I promise, gang, I *will* get back to [Down to Size](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6921097) and [No Haven in this World](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7196144). I can’t tell you when for certain, but please know that they have not been abandoned. They will be finished.


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